Socio-economic Background and Early Post-compulsory Education Pathways: A Comparison between Natives and Second-generation Immigrants in Switzerland

Abstract: This article investigates the differences in post-compulsory education pathways between natives and second-generation immigrants in Switzerland. It analyses to which extent the socio-economic background explains the different post-compulsory education trajectories of children of Swiss and second-generation immigrants. Using data from the Transition from Education to Employment survey (TREE), we use Optimal Matching Analysis to identify typical transitions encompassing the 7 years that follow the end of compulsory school and logistic regression to analyse the differences between native-born children and second-generation immigrants. In the first part of the article, we show that second-generation immigrants from low-skilled waves of migration are more likely to follow lower vocational tracks and to have an early transition into working class occupations. We also find that second-generation immigrants present higher likelihood of transition into ‘Not in education, employ-ment, or training ’ (NEET). In the second part of the article, we show that the early transition into working class occupations is entirely explained by socio-economic factors. We also demonstrate that, for the children of Portuguese, former-Yugoslav, Albanian, and Turkish immigrants, the socio-economic background plays a minor role in explaining the transitions into NEET. In this case, a disadvantage persists even after socio-economic background is taken into account in the model