Socio-economic status, school performance, and university participation: evidence from linked administrative and survey data from Australia

Abstract Despite being a target of various policy interventions across developed countries, disparities in higher education participation among students from different socio-economic backgrounds remain persistent. While previous literature has outlined the processes through which parental resources can shape students’ educational decisions and pathways, the evidence remains scarce on how the effects of social origin on the participation in higher education vary along the academic performance distribution. Utilising multilevel models applied to large-scale linked administrative and survey data from Australia, this study explores how the participation in higher education varies along the students’ performance distribution by their social origins. Our results show that the effects of social origins on university participation are most pronounced in the middle of the academic performance distribution and taper off towards either end. Consideration is also given to exploring different ways to capture socio-economic status (SES) (i.e. through parental education and occupation) as an indicator of social origins. The results show that parental education serves as a better predictor of students’ university participation than does parental occupation. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for educational policies aimed at increasing university participation among individuals from low-SES backgrounds.