Unequal Educational Transitions in Estonia: Tracking and family background

One of the most debated questions in recent research in social stratification concerns whether inequalities in educational attainment according to social background have changed or remained more or less stable. The main conclusion of a comparative study on the inequality of educational opportunities (Blossfeld and Shavit 1993) suggests class inequalities continue to exist in education in the majority of the studied countries. However, in recent years, this conclusion has been questioned for an increasing number of countries (see, for example, Vallet 2004; Ballarino et al. 2009; Barone 2009; Breen 2010). In their comparative analysis of eight European nations, Breen et al. (2009) provide evidence of an overall decline in inequalities in educational opportunities, with two exceptions: Italy and Ireland. For most former communist countries a pattern of persistent inequality during the socialist period is well documented (Heyns and Bialecki 1993; Matějů 1993; Gerber and Hout 1995; Nieuwbeerta and Rijken 1996; Hanley and McKeever 1997; Wong 1998), despite brief periods when the effects of social origins on educational attainments were temporarily reduced. As for the change in educational inequality during the post-communist transformation, all the available analyses in various countries lead to the hypothesis that class differentials in educational attainments and educational transitions increased after 1989 (Gerber 2000; Matějů et al. 2003; Bukodi and Goldthorpe 2010; Wu 2010). Overall, current empirical evidence points to declining inequalities in Nordic countries, increased inequalities in post-communist countries and mixed results (decreasing or stable) for Anglo-Saxon and continental European countries (see Barone 2009).

Several approaches have been developed in order to identify the impact of social origin on educational attainment. Mare (1981) popularized the model of educational transitions, which has been widely used in studies of educational inequality. This model enables researchers to acknowledge that social origin may have various impacts during different transitions through the costs, benefits and the probability of success (Breen and Goldthorpe 1997). However, the sequential model does not take into account that most European education systems are tracked by treating as stratified only in-school origins but not in-school destinations (Breen and Jonsson 2000; Lucas 2001). These tracks are qualitatively different and their graduates have a range of probabilities of continuing in education (see Gamoran and Mare 1989; Ayalon and Shavit 2004; Tieben et al. 2010). The choice between the tracks may have a distinctive social origin pattern. As Breen et al. (2009: 1515) indicate ‘if these differences (choice of particular field of education or track) have become stronger as inequalities in level of education have declined, then a focus solely on educational level will overestimate the extent to which inequalities have declined’.

In most former communist countries, there have been clear hierarchical tracks in secondary education. Research on long-term trends of social stratification in the structurally tracked education systems in these countries is scant, and most concentrate on the socialist period (see Gerber and Hout 1995; Titma and Saar 1995; Zhou et al. 1998). This paper pays special attention to the post-communist period and improves upon previous studies of educational inequality in former socialist countries by incorporating a long-term perspective into tracking research.

In this paper, we focus on a good example of a structurally tracked educational system, the Estonian school system. In Estonia the school system has been divided into three different tracks at the secondary level. There have been sharp shifts in educational policies in Estonia over time, which may cause fluctuations in educational inequalities. Several features of the Estonian transformation process make this country particularly interesting for studying changes in educational inequalities. First, Estonia is often cited as an example of the rapid implementation of a highly liberal economic policy and the modest role of the state (Bohle and Greskovits 2007), which as Milanovic (1999) argues, are accompanied by an increased level of social inequality. Second, in the 1990s, liberalization of educational policy translated into the very rapid expansion, as well as privatization, of higher education.

Previous analysis indicated that during the post-communist period social fluidity in Estonian society decreased (Saar 2010). Decreasing social fluidity across cohorts in Estonia has been driven by changes in educational inequality. However, the main shortcoming of previous research in Estonia is the fact that the tracking in educational system has been ignored. Several studies in other countries (Breen and Jonsson 2000; Lucas 2001) have emphasized the tracking but have not reported changes over time. In this paper, the advancement is made by applying multinomial logit models and testing changes in inequality over time.

Our aim is to analyse the relationship between class origin and educational transitions over time in Estonia on the basis of separating the different secondary school tracks and concentrating on two basic transition points in the Estonian education system: (1) basic education to secondary education and (2) secondary education to higher education. As mentioned above, previous analysis indicates that educational inequalities have increased in Estonia in the 1990s but this analysis did not show at which transition points inequalities have increased. We focus on the impact of educational expansion on educational inequalities as well as the role of broader political processes in opportunity structures.

During the socialist period, the Estonian educational system was a part of the Soviet educational system with high level of standardization and stratification (Helemäe and Saar 2011). The standard course of instruction began at the age of 7 and lasted for 11 years. After graduation at basic school, students were tracked into one of three types of secondary education: (1) general secondary schools (the traditional academic track), which provided a university preparatory curriculum; (2) vocational schools, which trained skilled workers for industry and other branches of the economy; and (3) specialized secondary schools, which combined vocational training with academic subjects and was originally intended to educate semiprofessionals. Students did not have any opportunity to transfer between tracks, although their future prospects and the returns to education relating to these tracks were very different (Saar 1997). The vocational track was dominated by negative selection because those who had been denied admission to other educational tracks usually went on to vocational schools (Titma and Saar 1995). Vocational schools and to a lesser extent specialized secondary schools were oriented to young people of a lower social status. After graduation from vocational and specialized secondary schools, youths were assigned to a particular job, where they had to work at least three years (see also Gerber 2000).

There were two main criteria for enrolment at higher education institutions: a diploma in secondary education and a pass in the university entrance examination. Theoretically graduates of any of the secondary education tracks should have had similar chances to obtain a university education. Actually never more than 1% of graduates of vocational schools and 5% of graduates of specialized secondary schools obtained a higher education (Helemäe et al. 2000). Despite various reforms, general secondary schools gave their graduates the best chance of continuing their studies at university, while vocational schools were educational ‘dead-ends’.

The changes in the educational structure in the 1990s were relatively minor. According to the Law on Education, a child is obliged to attend school if his/her seventh birthday occurs before the 1st of October of the current year. The Law also requires compulsory education until the age of 17 years or till graduation from basic school, which consists of nine annual grades. The upper secondary level covers grades 10–12. In 1997, the admission to specialized secondary schools was abandoned and most of these schools were reorganized to become professional higher education institutions. At the end of the 1990s, the Bologna Declaration was implemented, the 3 + 2 curriculum was adopted and provisions for professional higher education studies were drafted.

After the Second World War, we distinguish five historical periods in the development of educational opportunities in Estonia.

The first period (1946–1960) was a period of Stalinist terror. The wave of deportation in 1949 sent around 20,000 people to Siberia (Misiunas and Taagepera 1993) and youths whose extended families had been deported had less educational opportunities. In 1949, seven years of basic education became compulsory, which was extended to eight years in 1958. School fees were abolished in 1956 (Gerber and Hout 1995). In 1960, practically the whole cohort attained basic education. In the 1950s, the main problem for the youth generation was access to higher education. Rigid ideologization of the system meant that strict limits were set for young people from the former elites (Kera 1998).

The period between 1960 and 1965 has been characterized as the ‘thaw’ period, which refers to Khrushchev's de-Stalinization and moderate political liberalization. This period also witnessed economic development as well as the redistribution of employment from agriculture to industry (Helemäe and Saar 2011). The welfare system of the socialist state partially compensated for the relatively low level of prosperity. At the end of the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s, the reforms undertaken during the Khrushchev period had an important impact on education. Quotas were determined for admission to higher education institutions, which favoured young people who had already been working as well as those with worker origins (Matthews 1982). To decrease educational inequalities, additional pathways (part-time evening and distance learning programmes) to university were created. The higher education institution enrolment ratio increased from 18% in 1960 to 25% in 1970. Almost all higher education students got a scholarship, which reduced economic restrictions.

Social and economic life in Estonia in the 1970s was characterized by increasing stagnation and centralized control (Helemäe and Saar 2011). In the mid-1960s, state-wide secondary education was declared an official policy goal and so the third period (1966–1975) was characterized by the expansion of secondary education and enrolment into the sector increased steadily in the 1970s (from 46% in 1960 to 76% in 1975). However, expansion at the secondary level outstripped enrolments at the higher education level, which means that the opportunities for young people with secondary education to attain higher education did not increase. Thus, the expansion at the secondary level produced a bottleneck at the higher level.

The fourth period from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s can be characterized by continuing expansion and the hierarchical differentiation of secondary education. At the end of the 1970s, the education ministry declared that the transition to secondary education had taken place. At the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, the general secondary school continued to dominate as the place to attain secondary education, but the proportion of this type of school in the secondary education system slightly declined (mainly due to the rapid development of vocational schools).

Economic reforms in Estonia in the 1990s have been described as the most radical amongst the post-socialist countries, particularly because of its highly liberal economic principles and the modest role of the state. The dominance of liberal right-wing parties in all governmental coalitions since 1992 has contributed to a liberal economic regime, characterized by low social expenditures (Lauristin 2003) and as a result social inequality increased (Kazjulja and Paškov 2011). While vocational education at the secondary and post-secondary levels became increasingly unpopular, higher education expanded rapidly through the emergence of private institutions of higher education and the expansion of professional higher education. Enrolment increased from 24% in 1990 to 74% in 2005. The proportion of students paying tuition increased from 7% in 1993 to 54% in 2005 and attests to the important role that private education has assumed in modern Estonia (Saar and Lindemann 2008). One would expect the increased privatization of higher education to strengthen the advantages that higher-origin young people have in entry to universities.

So besides the different speeds of educational expansion, distinctive state policies and political processes characterized each of these periods.

Raftery and Hout (1993) postulated the thesis of maximally maintained inequality (MMI) in education. It suggests that educational expansion increases lower-class participation only at lower educational levels where the enrolment of higher social classes is already so high that further expansion allows disadvantaged groups to benefit. Therefore, the chances of low-status groups can only increase when the demand for a given level of education is saturated among the children of the better off. This means that educational expansion does not reduce but postpones class selection to higher educational levels. Several studies have corroborated MMI by reporting either stable inequality over time or equalization following saturation (see for example, Shavit and Blossfeld 1993; Hanley 2001).

Lucas (2001) proposed a revision of the MMI hypothesis, which he called effectively maintained inequality (EMI), arguing that once the level of schooling becomes nearly universal social background will allocate students to different types (tracks) of education that have different implications for educational attainment. He hypothesized that ‘the socioeconomically advantaged will use their socioeconomic advantages to secure both quantitatively and qualitatively better outcomes’ (Lucas 2001: 1652). Educational expansion can increase the educational opportunities for children from lower classes while at the same time their admission to the élite institutions remains restricted (Shavit et al. 2007). Thus, social inequality at the intermediate level decreases over time but higher classes preserve their advantage at the higher educational levels.

Micro-level rational action models of educational decisions have also been proposed to explain the persistence of educational inequalities. Boudon (1974) assumes that social origin affects children's educational attainment through primary and secondary effects. While primary effects may mainly depend on the early environment that supports school performance, secondary effects may be understood as the consequence of rational action of children and parents. Building on this distinction, Breen and Goldthorpe (1997) propose a framework for integrating these two effects into the model of educational decisions. According to this model, any choice will depend on the perceived chances of success and failure as well as on the estimated costs and benefits associated with additional education (see also Erikson and Jonsson 1996).

There has been proposed several developments that could lead to changing differentials in decisions on continued education among children from different social classes. One is the diminishing school selection that is typically associated with educational expansion. However, studying the impact of educational expansion on social fluidity, Breen (2010) found that in Germany and Sweden, expansion and educational equalization reinforce each other, but in Britain, expansion occurred with little or no change in educational equality. Breen (2010) also suggested that if the beneficiaries of expansion are mainly young people from the higher classes, educational expansion can promote educational inequality. The second one involves school reforms, which may reduce the stratification of the school system by introducing comprehensive secondary education and decrease the impact of social origin on educational attainment (Ballarino et al. 2009). Changes in the level of economic inequality and in economic insecurity could also have impact on the level of inequality in educational attainment. This inequality should be reduced in periods of diminishing economic inequality (Hansen 2008). Aggressive welfare state redistribution could also promote equality of educational opportunities (Esping-Andersen and Wagner 2012).

Considering historical developments in Estonian educational system and the theoretical explanations we proposed to test the following hypotheses:

The Estonian Social Survey (ESS) was established in the framework of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions project, with the main aim of providing information on social exclusion and income. The nationally representative sample of households randomly selected from the updated Population Census 2000 database initially included approximately 4500 households and 10,000 individuals. All household members aged 15 years or above were interviewed. In total, 3996 households and 8906 individuals were interviewed. The response rate was 89%. The 2005 sample included households that were interviewed in 2004 and also new households were added to make the sample representative. There were quite a lot missing data about parental social class thus we have information about 4803 respondents to analyse.

ESS 2004 has a separate section providing an overview of the events in an individual's life, such as studies, family, working life and changes in the place of residence but it does not include questions about social origin, whereas the ESS 2005 does. As the ESS is a panel survey (one survey cycle lasts four years) it was possible to combine two data sets. In this article, we analyse the educational transitions for four birth cohorts born between 1935 and 1984. We defined four cohorts, based on previously described periods and enrolment trends.

The disadvantage of using ESS data for analysing educational transitions is the fairly small sample size for given cohorts. For example, ‘older’ birth cohorts covering the First World War (1910–1919) and the years of the 1st Republic (1920–1934) or the ‘younger’ birth cohorts, since independence was restored (born after 1984), are not included in the analyses.

The information on educational attainment is retrospective, starting with the first choice after graduation from basic school (T1). The alternatives are to leave school, to begin studies at a general secondary school, at a specialized secondary school (until 1997) or at a vocational secondary school. After the second transition point (T2), graduation from a secondary education institution, there are four choices: to leave school, to begin studies at a vocational school, at a specialized secondary school (until 1997) or at a higher education institution. This second transition is conditional on the first one. It means that only those respondents who succeeded the first transition are at risk for the second one. Students were followed up until 2004 (i.e. when the youngest respondents were 20 years old). For all choices, we know which track the student chose, although for some analyses these are grouped together in fewer broad categories. Table 1 presents the variables and their distribution.

Social origin is measured as the highest of the mother's or father's social class. The occupations of the respondents and their parents were converted from their original codes in the three-digit version of ISCO-88 to a four-category version. We separated managers and professionals, lower non-manual workers, skilled manual workers and unskilled manual workers. This class schema captures the essential social stratification in socialist and post-communist countries. Several authors (Titma et al. 2003; Gerber and Hout 2004) analysed the applicability of that scheme to socialist and post-socialist societies. The educational level of both parents is available as a categorical variable with eight categories. We combined some categories using the following scale: basic education, vocational education, general secondary education, specialized secondary education and higher education. The parent with the higher educational attainment of both determines the parental education.

We used multinomial logit models which include social origin, birth cohort and gender as explanatory variables. Trends in the impact of social origin are tested by the inclusion in the model of the interaction of social origin and cohort.

The trends in two main educational transitions are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 indicates that educational opportunities at the secondary level increased for the cohort 1950–1959. The proportion leaving the educational system decreased from 20% to 5% in the second half of the 1960s. In the cohort 1975–1984, this percentage increased somewhat again. Changes in the distribution between different tracks have been quite minor (especially for the middle two cohorts, 1950–1959 and 1960–1974). The highest track (general secondary school) grew at the expense of the youngsters who dropped out of the educational system for cohorts 1950–1959 and 1960–1974. For the cohort 1975–1984, the percentage of young people continuing their studies at general secondary school reached 60% because admission to specialized secondary schools was abolished in 1997. For vocational secondary schools, we found a small increase in participation for the 1975–1984 cohort which may be as a result of the expansion of vocational education in the 1970s.

There are no remarkable changes in the distribution of cohorts from 1935 to 1974 after graduation from secondary education (Figure 2). About one-third of young people left school, about two-fifth chose higher education institutions and others continued studies at vocational or specialized secondary schools. Figure 2 shows the clear expansion of higher education in the second half of the 1990s: 60% of members of the 1975–1984 cohort made the transition to university studies and only a quarter left the educational system.

Distribution at point T1 (choice of secondary school track) has crucial consequences for the total distribution of educational qualifications because, as Table 2 shows, the probabilities of continuing to tertiary education vary sharply between different secondary school tracks: while only 5–9% of those who completed vocational secondary school were enrolled at university, this was true for 42% (35–59% for different cohorts) of those who finished the academic secondary school track. The impact of secondary school track on the following transition in the education system seems to be quite similar for different cohorts.

To test the hypotheses we used different logit models. First, we modelled the transition from basic education to secondary education using a binary logit model. Table 3 gives an overview of its –2LL and chi-square values. Starting a model with three independent variables (cohort, gender and parental position) step by step we added the additional variables as parental education and cohort interactions of parental education and parental social status. The preferred model is Model III, with cohort, gender, parental social status and cohort interaction for changes in the effects of parents' social status. It means that the effects of parental social status and education do not follow the same pattern: the impact of parental social position has changed but the effect of parental education remained the same for different cohorts.

As the second step, we used a multinomial logit model, contrasting three different secondary school tracks with leaving education. The modelling strategy was the same as in the previous case. For Model III, which adds an interaction between cohort and parental status, the fit improves somewhat showing that the impact of social origin on the choice of secondary school track has changed over time.

The third step of the analysis used a series of logit models for transition to higher education. Model I fits the effects of cohort, gender and parental social status. The addition of parental education and secondary school track into the model improved the fit significantly (Models II and IV). However, Models III, V and VI, which added interactions between cohort and social origin variables, did not improve the fit, indicating that the association between social origin and transition probabilities to university has not changed over time. The preferred model is Model VII which includes the main effects of the explanatory variables as well as the interaction of secondary school track with cohort. This interaction represents the change in the effect of secondary school track over time.

The preferred model indicated that the inequality in terms of parental social status increased for the youngest cohort (especially the differences in transition probabilities between the children of unskilled workers and of other social classes) but there was no change for the cohorts 1950–1959 and 1960–1974 compared with the cohorts which entered secondary education institutions in the 1950s and at the beginning of 1960s (see Appendix Table A1). So, the expansion of secondary education in the 1970s has not decreased the social inequality in access to secondary education. Therefore our results did not confirm the first hypothesis. However, the impact of parental education was strong for all cohorts but the effect of parental social position has increased for the youngest cohort.

Inequality in the transition to the academic track of secondary education increased somewhat for the cohort 1950–1959. However, the change is quite small compared with the cohort 1935–1949: children of professionals improved their chances to enter general secondary schools to some extent. A significant increase in inequality took place in the 1990s: the transition probability of young people originating from the families of professionals to general secondary school was 0.78, whereas it was only 0.32 for the children of unskilled workers. For other tracks of secondary education, cohort differences on the impact of parental social status were smaller. This result confirms the third hypothesis.

The model selected for the transition to higher education (Model VII) showed that the impact of social origin on this transition has not changed over time (neither the impact of parental social status nor parental education). The transition rates increased significantly for the cohort 1975–1984 but that this increase has been distributed proportionally across all social classes (see model estimates Appendix Table A2). This means that social inequality in access to higher education has not increased in the 1990s. So, our analysis confirmed the second hypothesis but cannot support the fourth hypothesis.

The preferred model (Model VII) also demonstrated that the impact of the secondary school track on the transition to university increased for the cohort 1975–1984. A statistically significant increase took place in the inequalities between graduates of general secondary schools and other types of secondary education in the second half of the 1990s. For young people who attained general secondary education the opportunities to enter universities improved substantially, while for graduates of vocational secondary schools, these opportunities remained unchanged.

In this paper, we set out to explain trends in two decisive transition points in the Estonian education system: transition to basic school to different secondary education tracks and transition from secondary education institutions to higher education. Previous research has not accounted for the track nature of the Estonian secondary education system. Our analysis showed the importance of the track choice because the effects of shifts in participation and changes in family background are specific to different secondary education tracks. This approach allowed us to point out, at which transition point inequalities in educational attainment emerge.

Our data set allowed us to trace the development of the effects of parental education and social status from the 1950s until the period after the radical social changes in the 1990s. The analysis focused on testing four hypotheses.

Our analysis showed persistent inequality in the transition to secondary education during the period of socialism, despite the expansion of secondary education in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus neither growth nor saturation is a necessary condition for decreasing the effects of family background variables. The results also indicate that the choice of a secondary track was strongly dependent on social background, which is in accordance with previous results about the impact of tracking on educational inequalities (see Müller and Karle 1993; Marks 2005). Overall, our results refute the thesis of MMI; rather, they are consistent with the EMI thesis, which claims that the differentiation of a given educational level substitutes qualitative inequalities for quantitative ones (see Lucas 2001). The expansion of secondary education resulted in a very limited equalization because in the meanwhile the middle classes expand their enrolments in general secondary education.

The impact of social origin on transitions to higher education institutions remains unchanged between the 1960s and 1980s. This is a proof of the complete failure of policy measures directed to make the access to higher education more egalitarian (see also Gerber and Hout 1995). With regard to the period of post-socialist development, the analysis showed that social inequalities in the transition probabilities to secondary education increased significantly. The impact of parental social status on transition to the most prestigious secondary school track also increased. The preferential development of the general secondary school track in the 1990s was accompanied by growing opportunities for the children of professionals to enter this type of school. Opportunities for other social classes did not change. Breen et al. (2009) indicate that one important mechanism for declining educational inequality is the substantial reduction in class origin effects at the transition to secondary education. We found that in post-socialist Estonia class inequalities at this transition point increased. This result might explain a previously found increase in educational inequalities in the 1990s (see Saar 2010). The reversed equalization of educational opportunities in Estonia has echoed previous findings from several post-socialist countries (see Gerber 2000; Bukodi and Goldthorpe 2010).

We found that social origin variables had a strong impact on the transition to higher education. Surprisingly, this effect did not change during either in socialist period or in the 1990s. The increasing enrolment in higher education in the 1990s produced only minor changes in the effects of social origins on the probability of entry to higher education. This finding contradicts expectations derived from MMI, which implies that the effects of origin on transition probabilities should decrease in proportion to enrolments. This pattern could result from two factors having opposite effects on class inequalities in transitions to higher education. On one side, expansion of higher education might decrease while on the other side privatization of higher education and the growth of social inequality might increase this impact. These factors might counterbalance each other and explain our results about the stable impact of social origin in the 1990s. Another explanation is based in the consequences of stricter origin-based selection at the secondary level. Because social selection at the secondary level became more pronounced in the 1990s, lower-origin young people who completed general secondary school could have performed better on average on the unmeasured attributes that contribute to their academic success, such as ability and motivation. The result is persistent inequality in the transition to higher education, because the impact of the secondary education track on this transition has increased.

The findings suggest that effects of class and parental education do not follow the same patterns over time. We found an increase of the effects of parental class and no change in the impact of parental education on educational transitions in the 1990s, which means that besides a family's cultural resources the importance of material resources increased in the post-communist period.

This complex pattern – increased stratification at transition to secondary education and stable stratification at entry to higher education – is similar to the pattern found in post-Soviet Russia (Gerber 2000). But if Estonia witnessed a contraction at secondary level but expansion at the higher level, in Russia enrolments fell at both levels. Therefore opposite trends (increased and decreased enrolments) may produce a similar result (stable stratification).

Our main conclusion is that the distribution of educational opportunity is related more to the rules that govern educational selection and the mechanisms of resource distribution than to the expansion of the educational system per se (Wu 2010). Estonia seems to be similar to Britain, where educational expansion also occurred with no change in educational equality (Breen 2010). From a policy perspective, it means that expansion is not necessarily an effective tool for the reduction of inequality of educational opportunities.

We were not able to take into account the hierarchical differentiation of higher education. According to the typology offered by Shavit et al. (2007), Estonia has a diversified higher education system and in these conditions university education, which is still considered better and more prestigious than professional higher education, could maintain and increase its level of selectivity (see also Saar and Unt 2011). We concentrated on social origin effects, but inequalities based on gender, ethnicity and other indicators are obvious alternatives.

Previous studies (Helemäe et al. 2000) indicate the compensatory effect of social background on educational transitions, which means that young people with higher social origin placed in non-academic track have had ‘a second chance’ (see Bernardi 2012). Further analysis is needed to study this compensatory effect more thoroughly.

Ellu Saar is a Professor at the Institute of International and Social Studies, Tallinn University, Estonia. She coordinated the EU Sixth Framework Project ‘Towards a Lifelong Learning Society in Europe: The Contribution of the Education System’ (LLL2010). Her research areas are social stratification and mobility, educational inequalities and life course studies. She is an editor of Studies of Transition States and Societies, a member of the Editorial Board of European Sociological Review and a member of the Steering Committee of the European Consortium of Sociological Research. She has published papers in Europe-Asia Studies, European Societies, International Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, European Sociological Review etc.

Kristel-Amelie Aimre received a Master degree in sociology, European societies from Freie University Berlin, Germany. She studied sociology and social sciences at Tallinn University in Estonia (B.A. degree in 2011) and at Toulouse le Mirail University in France (2009/2010). Her research interests include social and ethnic inequality as well as educational transitions.