Social stratification in secondary school success after ambitious track choices

It is well established in the literature on social stratification in educational attainment that children in families with high socio-economic status (SES) choose more academically demanding educational pathways than children in low SES families, particularly if they did not perform well in school. However, little is known about whether children succeed on these tracks. We make two contributions to this literature: First, we evaluate whether children with low academic preparedness successfully graduate from the academic track in Germany and whether a high SES compensates for low academic preparedness. Second, we try to identify the underlying mechanisms of differences in success rates: Differences could either be attributed to children catching up academically or different reactions to low performance on the academic track. We do so by following the educational trajectories of 2,371 children who transferred to the academic track in 2010 for nine years using survival analysis. In general, children with low academic preparedness are much more likely to downgrade to another track. However, among the children with low academic preparedness, particularly high SES children succeed on the academic track. Yet, little of the differences in success rates by academic preparedness and SES can be attributed to performance in the academic track which limits the contribution of both proposed mechanisms.