Kevin Schoenholzer
PhD Student
Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development
Research Group: Education and Human Development
University of Zurich
I am currently a PhD candidate at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, working on a Swiss National Science Foundation project: "Understanding Social Gradients in Education". I obtained my Master's degree in Political Science and Economic History from the University of Zurich, where I completed my thesis on "The Impact of Rising Income Inequality on Turnout in Switzerland 1995 - 2015".
My current study, "Welfare State Policy and Educational Inequality", in peer review, examines how policies like public early childhood education, parental leave, and family benefits can influence educational outcomes across social strata. We analyze international student data to understand the correlation between parental education and children's academic achievements. Concurrently, I investigate the impact of educational expansion on the belief that education should determine future earnings. This research utilizes international survey data to examine shifts in public opinion and educational attainment. I will conduct a 6-month research stay at the University of Toronto, collaborating on a new study "Structural Social Changes and Educational Mobility". We seek to explore how educational expansion and changes in social origin affect educational mobility, using harmonized data from seven of the worlds longest running household panels.
Research Interest:
My research interests include social inequality, government policy, citizen beliefs/attitudes, and statistical modeling using large scale cross-sectional or longitudinal data from multiple countries.
My Academic CV: here
Highlighted Work:
Welfare State Policy and Educational Inequality: A Cross-National Multicohort Study
Welfare policy descriptives. Note: Public early childhood education and care as % of GDP, public family benefits spending as % of GDP and paid parental leave duration in weeks, across country sample and years.
Abstract
Proponents of welfare policy have argued that publicly funded early childhood education and care (ECEC), paid parental leave, and family benefits spending can weaken the influence of social background on educational outcomes by providing a supplementary source of early investment that particularly benefits disadvantaged families. We analyse whether the welfare state context in which children spend their early childhood (ages 0-5) moderates the association between parental educational attainment and the child’s educational achievement at age 10. We combine data from two large-scale international student assessments with data about welfare state policies. Results from multilevel models show that countries with higher public ECEC spending and higher family benefits spending exhibited a weaker association between parental education and student math achievement. Countries with longer parental leave exhibited a stronger association between parental education and student math, science and reading achievement. Findings provide evidence of the mixed role of welfare state policies for social inequality in student achievement.
Keywords: education, inequality, welfare policy
[Accepted to ESR, Jan 2024]