Upper secondary school tracking, labour market outcomes and intergenerational inequality in Denmark

Abstract

We study the relationship among family background, placements in upper secondary school tracks and labour market outcomes in the comprehensive welfare state of Denmark. We base our study on high-quality data from Danish administrative registers with a focus on the 1986 birth cohort, which allows us to examine very fine-grained measures of track placement in upper secondary schools. Our analyses show three results. First, upper secondary track placement is consequential for labour market outcomes, even after we control for the selection into tracks on pre-track academic performance and family background characteristics. Second, upper secondary track placement appears to affect labour market outcomes even net of higher education attainment. Third, educational tracking appears to play a role in intergenerational social reproduction net of family background-based skill gaps, suggesting that track choice help maintain inequalities across generations. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on educational tracking.