| Affirmative action, and the bearing it has on educational opportunity, has become the focus of a heated debate among both policy-makers and the general public. Former socialist states addressed this thorny issue and claimed that their egalitarian policies reduced socioeconomic inequality in access to education. My dissertation seeks to evaluate this assertion and related issues by conducting statistical analyses of data from the 'Social Stratification in Eastern Europe after 1989' survey in order to assess the impact of Communism on inequality of educational opportunity in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia after 1948.; I document that socialist egalitarian policies were successful in reducing socioeconomic inequality in access to secondary and post-secondary education, but their effects were limited to brief historical periods and some school transitions. I prove, nonetheless, that the effects of the 'Communist Affirmative Action' didn't persist over the life of cohorts because its impact was overridden by differential delayed entry of previously unsuccessful applicants. I also investigate the role of non-standard progressions through the education system for education inequality and reveal that non-standard education was a mechanism of sponsored mobility utilized by the Communist Parties to promote loyal working class youth to become future supervisors, administrators, and/or managers. Finally, I explore the consequences of a non-standard sequencing of educational transitions for overall level of education inequality. I report that educational transitions in the non-standard trajectory were stratified less than transitions in the standard trajectory. Nonetheless, choosing the non-standard path wasn't a rational attainment strategy, because it was too narrow in comparison to the standard pathway. I draw a number of conceptual conclusions from my research. I highlight the importance of the study of the exact attainment timing and detailed education histories---in addition to exploring the highest level of schooling---for our understanding of educational stratification. I also argue that scholars may benefit from extending the classical model of educational stratification to encompass an element of a discrete choice, because it is conceptually defensible and leads to statistically attractive models. |
