Socialist societies often emphasized the abolition of traditional social classes. To achieve this objective, educational opportunities were at times 'actively managed' and allocated to children of less educated parents. What happened to these patterns after the demise of socialist rule in...

Over the last decades the German education system underwent numerous reforms in order to improve "equality of opportunity", i.e. to guarantee all pupils equal access to higher education. At the same time internationally comparative evidence yields that Germany features particularly low...