The End of Compulsory School for Migrants: One More Year for Low-Track Students

Abstract

Integration of migrants into the host country depends on many factors. Using a typology based on different forms of capital (financial and human, social, and political), we focus on migrant integration into the Swiss schooling system, as expressed by their track choice at the upper-secondary level. In particular, we examine whether school transitions of children from certain migrant communities are negatively affected by a lack of social capital. To do so, we estimate a reduced-form multinomial logit, using longitudinal data from the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland), for the period 1990-2007. While differing substantially between high-track and low-track students, results confirm our expectations: first, social capital matters independently of human and financial capital; second, while affecting all students, the impact of a lack of social capital is higher on high-track students. However, the accumulation of social capital, trough experience inside the schooling system, plays generally a greater role for low-track students, but results differ when several profiles of students are considered. In particular, among low-track male students, recent migrants are disadvantaged, compared to natives and first-wave migrants, as they are, ceteris paribus, more often oriented toward non-certifying remedial education. For both types of students, nationality dummies remain significant, suggesting that other factors are at play, such as cultural orientation towards effort or reception of a particular community in the destination country. Finally, structural compositions of middle schools explain almost all the remaining differences between schools (i.e. school effects), once individual and familial characteristics have been considered: while sharing the same school, low-track and high-track students face different socioeconomic and sociodemographic external effects on their transition probabilities.