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In many Western countries, researchers have documented ambitious educational choices among students of immigrant origin, for example, the tendency to choose academically more demanding routes than others at given levels of school achievement (e.g. grades, GPA). While this may indicate integration, some warn against an ‘immigrant optimism trap’, because choosing more demanding tracks at lower levels of GPA may increase risks of non-completion. Using longitudinal Swedish population data (n ≈ 90,000), we estimate an upper secondary ‘ethnic completion gap’ of 12 per cent to the detriment of students of immigrant background. We then address the ‘trap hypothesis’ via two analyses. The first shows that if students of immigration background would make similar educational choices as other students at the same GPA, the completion gap would shrink by 3.4 percentage points. The second analysis, based on simulations, suggests that restricting admission to academic programmes based on prior GPA, would lead to a massive relocation of low- and mid-GPA students to—usually less demanding—vocational programmes, but would only reduce the completion gap by 2.2 percentage points. These changes must be considered marginal in view of the substantial restrictions of choice that either of these measures would entail. We conclude that completion gaps are not primarily a result of unfounded immigrant optimism, and that optimistic choices are likely to be a net positive for integration by improving the chances of immigrant youth to reach tertiary-level qualifications and professional occupations.

The authors examine cross-national variation in the ethnic gradient in aspirations among 14-year-olds in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden by using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries, collected in 2009/2010. Results show that most ethnic minority groups are more likely to have university aspirations than ethnic majority youth. The most consistent minority advantage is found in England and Sweden, consistent with the interpretation that the ample scope for choice in progression through these school systems allows high ambitions of minorities to play out well. However, minority advantage of some groups is also present in the Netherlands and Germany, where transitions are more heavily conditional on previous performance. The pattern for immigrant generational status varies across countries and ethnic origins. There is no consistent empirical evidence indicating that aspiration differences between ethnic minority and majority youth will diminish due to assimilation processes across the generations.

The present study addresses the question to what extent language skills among students are influenced by the composition of the overall classroom context and the composition of friendship networks within school classes. Furthermore, we ask whether the effects differ between stratified school systems, with a more homogenous student body in school classes, and comprehensive school systems, with a more heterogeneous student body. Focusing only on classroom characteristics, we find positive effects of the socioeconomic and cognitive overall composition of the school class in Germany’s selective school system, but not in Sweden’s comprehensive system. In contrast, the ethnic composition does not matter significantly in any of the systems, while direct peer interactions, captured with social networks measures targeting friends in a school class, matter slightly more in Sweden’s comprehensive school system.

The aim of this paper is to review the most important empirical results on the development of social-background inequalities in educational attainment of adolescents in Sweden at the end of compulsory education and in upper secondary education. The focus is on quantitative studies of the development during the past 25-30 years. Research indicate that the role of family background for adolescents' grade point averages at the end of com-pulsory education has been remarkable stable during the 20-year period between 1988 and 2007, while social inequality in upper secondary education is to a larger extent character-ized by change. Importantly, the development of social inequality in upper secondary educa-tion depends on the aspect in focus. One general conclusion is that so called "primary ef-fects" account for a substantial part of the inequality process to academic upper secondary education, and seems to be more resistant to change over time than 'secondary effects' are.