- 25 September 2025
- Posted by: Centro Studi D'Agliano
- Category: Conferences and seminars, Events, General, News
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Pia Pinger (University of Cologne) on “Educational Inequalities and Mental Models of School Success” jointly organised by Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano, BAFFI and the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods (University of Milan) in collaboration with the Dipartimento di Economia, Metodi Quantitativi e Strategie di Impresa (Università Milano Bicocca), the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale (Politecnico di Milano) and the Department of Economics of the University of Insubria.
The seminar will be held on Thursday, 9th October 2025 at 12:15 p.m. (CEST) in a hybrid format:
> DEMM seminar room, via Conservatorio 7, 2nd floor;
> Teams
In-person meetings will be organised before and after the seminar. If you wish to meet the speaker, please select one option here (by 7th October).
Abstract:
Persistent educational inequalities exist worldwide, with girls and students from highly educated families consistently achieving better school grades. But how do adolescents perceive these disparities, and how do such beliefs about these inequalities shape their own educational choices? We explore these questions in the context of Danish 15-year-olds about to make their first educational track choice.
We first show that adolescents’ quantitative beliefs about performance gaps are fairly accurate on average, but this masks substantial heterogeneity. Open-text responses reveal that individuals attribute gender gaps and success among less privileged students to meritocratic factors, whereas a stronger performance of socioeconomically privileged students is seen as stemming from external advantages. Beliefs appear to be shaped by both social environments and intra-family transmission. Finally, systematic performance gaps matter for enrollment decisions: they are associated with widening enrollment gaps across groups and causally affect students’ own expectations of success. Our findings have implications for understanding education choices in face of persistent educational inequalities and shed light on the role of mental models in a high-stakes setting.
