Equal opportunities for immigrants in Swiss schools? School experience and educational solidarity attitudes

Abstract

Education, and mandatory schooling in particular, is a central mechanism for governments to improve life outcomes and prevent the accumulation of disadvantage across generations. Yet educational sociology research suggests that education can also entrench patterns of inequality, with children from immigrant backgrounds facing barriers to equal opportunity. Policy reforms to reverse such disadvantage include delaying the tracking age and offering free or subsidised daycare places to immigrant children. However, we know little about public support for such policies. In this article, we argue that one’s own experience of educational equality impacts micro-level preferences for equality-enhancing policies (EEPs). Using a survey experiment fielded in 2024 in Switzerland, our findings suggest that support for EEPs is a function of the one’s satisfaction with equal opportunities at school: Those who did not perceive their schooling to be fair and who attended school in less egalitarian cantons show the strongest support for reforming the system to become more egalitarian. We conclude that negative experience of schooling may have an, albeit indirect, effect on support for policies that reduce educational inequality. .