Key findings

Migrant achievement penalties in Western Europe

A first order of contributions made by this study relates to its descriptive findings. By examining standardized assessments of fifteen-year-old students on the literacy domains of mathematics, reading, and science, I have provided a detailed picture of the educational achievement of second-generation immigrants in Western Europe near the end of compulsory schooling. Empirical findings indicate that, although they were born and socialized in the destination country – as well as fully exposed to its educational system – second-generation immigrants dramatically underachieve with respect to their native peers. In most countries, the average second-generation immigrant is positioned below the 30th percentile of the achievement distribution of natives.

To a large extent, this underachievement can be explained in terms of traditional mechanisms of stratification by social class broadly defined. Indeed, in some countries the relative educational disadvantage of secondgeneration immigrants is more than halved when accounting for social, economic, and cultural resources differentials. This is in line with previous country studies and international studies on the educational achievement of the second generation (e.g., Kristen and Granato 2007; Van de Werfhorst and Van Tubergen 2007; Schneeweis 2011). My analyses – and in particular the novel procedure of fuzzy-set coincidence – additionally revealed the compound social disadvantage from which many children of immigrants in Western Europe suffer. Not only are second-generation immigrants more likely than natives to have low-educated parents, parents working in the least socially prestigious occupations, to live in poor households, and to have limited access to cultural and educational resources. They are also more likely to cumulate all of these factors of social disadvantage at once. This pattern of multiple, or compound, disadvantage is particularly evident in countries where their educational underachievement is more severe.

However, the relative disadvantage of students with an immigrant background cannot be completely explained by different socioeconomic status (SES). Therefore, migrant-specific penalties in educational achievement are in place (see also Rothon 2007; Heath and Brinbaum 2014b). This penalty is partially due to the fact that in some countries, second-generation immigrants experience negative differential returns to SES. In other words, they benefit less than natives from favorable endowments in socioeconomic or cultural resources. Possibly, in order to navigate these educational systems, country-specific cultural capital is particularly important, so that the cultural capital of immigrant parents is more easily devalued (Leopold and Shavit 2013).