The Social Geography of Education: Neighborhood, Class Composition, and the Educational Achievement of Elementary School Students in Zurich, Switzerland

Despite an impressive amount of research and policy intervention no robust pattern of neighborhood effects on educational attainment has previously been identified. Adequate theoretical modeling and the sensitivity of the results to the method of the study are the major challenges in this area of research. This paper elaborates the social mechanisms of neighborhood effects and applies various methodological approaches to test them. Using data from Switzerland, the research reported here has detected heterogeneous effects of neighborhood on elementary school students’ educational achievement in Zurich. Although modest in comparison with the effects of classroom composition, these effects appear to be mediated primarily through social integration into a local peer network and are differentiated according to students’ gender and their social origin.

The Bulgarian educational system and gender segregation in the labour market

School-to-work transitions are embedded in the institutional structures of educational systems. In particular, vocational education has been linked to greater horizontal gender segregation in employment. Similarly, research on higher education has uncovered how stratification at the tertiary level can promote gender segregation in the labour market. This paper investigates how gender typical employment is conditioned by the institutional features of the educational system in Bulgaria. Despite the post-socialist transformations of Bulgaria's educational system and its labour market, horizontal gender segregation has remained rather moderate from an international perspective. We use data from a 2012 nationally representative survey. We find that the educational system shapes the gendered occupational trajectories for men but it does not hold the same explanatory power for women. Neither vocational nor higher education has a significant effect for women. In contrast, men with vocational education are more likely to work in male-typed occupations and, in line with the literature, higher education steers men toward gender mixed and a-typical occupations. Our study points to the importance of educational institutional factors in shaping gender (a)-typical career paths. The Bulgarian case, in particular, offers insights into the mechanisms that can potentially decrease horizontal gender segregation in the labour market.