Privileges among the Privileged

Klaus Birkelbach^1*Hermann Duelmer²Heiner Meulemann²

• ¹Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany
• ²University of Cologne, Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

The effect of starting conditions at age 16 on occupational success from age 16 to 66 in an educationally privileged group.Educational selection separates more successful students from the less successful ones. The positively selected students should be better than the ones left behind, but they should also be more homogeneous. Among the ones privileged by educational selection the mean of achievement, of school grades and test intelligence, should be higher than in the student population at large, and the standard deviation lower. Equally, social resources which have partly determined achievement should also be higher in the privileged than in the student population at large. But this does not mean that achievement and social origin no longer filter the student population. They continue to differentiate careers. They may again privilege the already privileged by creating "cumulative advantages" (DiPrete and Eirich, 2006, p. 286;Schafer et al., 2011 Schafer et al., , pp. 1056-7)-7). "Existing social inequalities are deepened further because it is already privileged social groups that profit most from atypical paths to higher secondary education" (Buchholz et al., 2016, p. 90). And they have consequence for the occupational career and the inequality of societies at large (Triventi et al., 2016, pp. 4-6, 12-13).