Barriers of the Selection to Secondary and University-Level Education

This paper analyses educational inequalities in Poland over the last two decades. Using data from national surveys carried out during the period 1982–2002 these results provide insight into the relationship between social origin and transition to secondary schools and university levels. Transition to both secondary school and universities are unquestionably selective by social class. The only question is whether these patterns have changed over the last two decades, when the communist regime collapsed and new inequalities emerged. Previous cross-time analyses for most countries showed a lack of substantial changes in educational inequalities over long periods of time. The main findings of the investigation can be summarised as follows. First, it showed that the effect of the class position of the father significantly increased in the 1990s, and then-until 2002-it declined to the degree of the 1980s, before the communist system collapsed. Second, in accordance with the findings of all previous studies, secondary school transition proved to be more selective as compared to that to the university level