School failure, economic crisis and inequality of educational opportunities: Spain and Argentina

The objective of this paper is to analyse the effect of economic crises on the inequality of educational opportunities through a comparison of the performances of Spanish and Argentine families. The chosen indicator is administrative school failure, defined as not achieving the minimum qualification required in the education system. These effects are limited to the income effect, by which, faced with a decline in household income, school failure increases; and to the substitution effect, by which poor labour market performance makes the option of schooling more attractive. The data compare the years prior to and after the economic crisis of 2008 with a population of young people aged 19 and 20 years old living in Argentina and Spain. The dependent variable is school failure, and as an independent variable we take the level of education of the household, the immigration situation and variables to model the economic situation. The models are estimated by sex and country and by interactions with the crisis year. The results show that the substitution effect prevails in Spain, whereas the income effect prevails in Argentina, with no structural changes between social origin and school failure being detected in either country.