Browsing by Author "Moilanen, Ville-Johannes"

The aim of this literature review study is to analyse the heritability of education and socioeconomic status in the Finnish context. Additionally the study investigates charts of growth in the spatial socioeconomic segregation within the city of Helsinki and how it affects to the operational preconditions of schools, educational outcomes and studies chosen after comprehensive school. All of the neighbourhood effect studies chosen for this literature review are studies of urban segregation. The interest on studies related to perspectives of sociology of education and educational psychology. This literature review is a background research for my Master´s thesis. The Finnish comprehensive school is well respected in Finland and world-wide because of its equality. The Finnish education system has been widely studied and although Finnish schools are equal for all the pupils it has been found out that there is a same phenomenon as in many other education systems: the “utopia” of equality in the Finnish comprehensive school (Kivinen & Rinne, 1995). Schools are open for everyone and there has been an expansion of education, but still there is little of social mobility (ia Kivinen & Rinne, 1995; Erola, 2010b). There is a strong relation between the education level of the parents and children’s education and socioeconomic status in adulthood. Studies have shown that if parents have a higher socioeconomic status, the children seem to know their upcoming highest education degree earlier (Rinne, 2007; Seppänen, 2006) and are also strongly motivated to gaining that goal. (Tynkkynen, 2013). The studies of urban segregation in Helsinki have also found out differences in pupils´ educational outcomes and parents´ school choices (Bernelius, 2008, 2013; Kauppinen & Bernelius, 2013). There are differences in the socioeconomic demography in Helsinki that affect operational preconditions of schools. Pupils´ background differences have also an effect on pupils´ school choices which leads to growth in regional variations on educational outcomes. This literature review study show that there are still unknown mechanisms in the phenomenon of heritability of education and socioeconomic status to be studied in the future. Particularly how parents´ education and socioeconomic status effects when do children define their highest educational degree aims.