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Be true to your school : school profiling and school sorting by socio-economic status
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0049-089X; 1096-0317
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Social science research, 2025, Vol. 132, Art. 103239, OnlineOnly
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ZWIER, Dieuwke, Be true to your school : school profiling and school sorting by socio-economic status, Social science research, 2025, Vol. 132, Art. 103239, OnlineOnly - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/93087
Abstract
Many national education systems have schools that adopt distinctive elements like alternative pedagogical concepts or specialty themes. This “school profiling” is suggested to drive school segregation by socio-economic status (SES). Since most existing research has focused on U.S. charter schools and lacks large-scale student-level data, the connection between profiling and SES-based school sorting remains unclear. This study addresses this gap by focusing on the case of the Netherlands, a country known for its high school autonomy and freedom of school choice. I use population-wide register data from over 110,000 students (aged 11–12), linked to novel data on school profiling. The findings reveal social stratification in access to schools with distinctive profiles, with higher-SES students having access to a more diverse pool of schools. Furthermore, conditional logit models show evidence of self-sorting by SES for some profiles: for instance, schools with progressive learning concepts are less popular among lower-SES students, while higher-SES students are comparatively less likely to choose labor market-themed schools. These SES disparities, however, are modest and not always in the expected direction. Overall, findings underscore the role of access disparities in shaping SES-based sorting, next to differential preferences for schooling.
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Published online: 12 August 2025
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This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - Elsevier Transformative Agreement (2023-2027)