Be True to Your School: School Profiling and School Sorting by Socio-Economic Status

Many national education systems have schools that adopt distinctive elements like alternativepedagogical concepts or specialty themes. This “school profiling” is thought to drive schoolsegregation by socio-economic status (SES). However, since most existing research has focusedon U.S. charter schools and lacks large-scale student-level data, the connection betweenprofiling and SES-based school sorting remains unclear. This study addresses this gap byfocusing on the case of the Netherlands, a country known for its high school autonomy andfreedom of school choice. I use population-wide register data from over 110,000 students (aged11–12), linked to novel data on school profiling. The findings reveal social stratification in accessto schools with distinctive profiles, with higher SES students having access to a more diversepool of schools. Furthermore, conditional logit models show evidence of self-sorting by SES forsome profiles: for instance, schools with progressive learning concepts are less popular amonglower SES students, while higher SES students are comparatively less likely to choose labormarket-themed schools. These SES disparities, however, are modest and not always in theexpected direction. Overall, findings underscore the role of access disparities in shapingSES-based sorting, next to differential preferences for schooling.