Catching Up? Country Studies on Intergenerational Mobility and Children of Immigrants by OECD

Author:OECD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education/Employment/Social Issues/Migration/Health
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Published: 2018-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

The long route into higher education

A special feature of the Dutch school system is that a student can climb the educational ladder by using different levels of vocational education as steppingstones. They can start at the lowest vocational level at age twelve, but in principle they can move from lower vocational education to secondary vocational education to higher vocational education to acquire a bachelor’s degree. Of course in practice this it is not at all easy, and students need a lot of stamina because it takes three years longer than the direct route from the pre-academic HAVO stream (higher general continued education) to higher vocational education at HBO (universities of applied sciences). A bit more than half of the children of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants responding to the TIES Survey in universities of applied sciences have indeed taken this “long route” (Crul, Schneider and Lelie, 2012), proving that this option is a crucial success factor of the Dutch educational system. The long route repairs much of the damage that early streaming and the convention of school advice cause for children of immigrants and children of less educated parents. It offers an important contribution to intergenerational upward mobility.

These four aspects – special arrangements for preschool, early selection, school advice and the possibility to move up in the school system through the long route – are the main characteristics of the school system that shape school outcomes for children of immigrants in the Netherlands. In the past two decades, all four of these key features underwent crucial changes that have impacted school results, both positively and negatively. Policies to include more children of immigrants in preschool had a slight positive effect, and over the years elementary schools have become better equipped to work with this group. Eliminating intermediary classes while retaining the school advice process has widened gaps in secondary school. The long route fortunately offers the possiblility of repairing a lot of the inequalities built into the first part of the school system. However, this long route is under pressure because of a change in the funding system for higher education, and because higher education institutions are erecting more and more barriers for students entering through the long route. The fact that the long route is one of the most crucial success factors in the Dutch school system for the upward mobility of disadvantaged children asks for careful monitoring and a more fundamental rethinking of the school system.

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