Rob J. Gruijters

As of 2025, 85% of the world population lives in countries typically associated with the Global South. Fifty percent of the world's population is under age 30. This article introduces the special issue on "Young Adult Life Courses in the Global South." It aims to provide a conceptual entry point for globally comparative research on young adult life courses. We systematize and contextualize key insights from the twelve contributions to this special issue on relevant macro-structural conditions for young adult life courses in the Global South, and on conceptualizing adulthood processes, including implications for young adults' agency. Based on the contributions, we propose a comparative framework that focuses on the locally specific interplay between economic, normative, and temporal conditions for young adult life courses.

Students from marginalized backgrounds are more likely to be subject to stereotypical and deficit-oriented teacher beliefs, which may contribute to low learning outcomes and diminished wellbeing. Most of the research on this topic is conducted in the US and other high-income countries, however, and evidence from the majority world, which is home of over 85% of all children, remains scattered and disconnected. This study therefore conducts a structured review of the literature on teacher beliefs and their implications for the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students in low- and middle-income countries.

Growth mindset is widely perceived to be a powerful lever for reducing inequalities in learning outcomes. This study investigates whether a growth mindset moderates or mediates the effect of socio-economic status (SES) on academic achievement across 73 countries, using data from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To do this, we employ a four-way decomposition approach to separate the total effect of SES on standardized test scores in math, reading, and science into direct, indirect, and interaction effects. The results show that growth mindset mediates only a small portion of the effect of SES on student achievements, accounting for no more than 2.9% to 3.2% of the total effect, depending on the subject. These findings challenge the influential idea that growth mindset can 'temper' the effect of poverty on academic achievement.

Ghana's Free Senior High School policy, which was introduced in 2017, is the most prominent and comprehensive free secondary education policy in the region. It is therefore an ideal case for studying the effects of free secondary education on students, families and schools. We conducted an in-depth qualitative study of students, parents and school leaders' perspectives on and experiences with the policy. The findings show that stakeholders generally appreciated the improvement in access, especially for low-income students and those from remote rural areas. However, they also indicated that the policy led to an inflow of unprepared students and exacerbated preexisting challenges related to scarce school resources and quality. Moreover, stakeholders believed that free secondary education reduced student motivation and increased the demand for boarding instead of day schooling. Based on these findings, we discuss options for improving the implementation of free secondary education policies and the Free SHS policy in particular.

In this study, we take stock of fee-free secondary education (FSE) initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa and review their impact on equitable access and achievement, as well as their cost-effectiveness. We begin by discussing the theoretical arguments for and against the abolition of secondary school fees. Second, we examine aggregate statistics on enrollment and transition rates and find that primary school completion remains far from universal in most countries in the region, meaning that most low-income children are currently ineligible for fee-free secondary education. Third, we provide a comprehensive overview of the existing FSE policies in sub-Saharan Africa, showing that almost half of all countries in the region have abolished secondary school fees in the last two decades. Finally, we systematically review empirical evidence on the impact and effectiveness of recent FSE initiatives. Our review suggests four concrete recommendations for policymakers that are broadly aligned with the principle of "progressive universalism" in improving access to education.

We propose a life course theoretical framework for understanding variation in family life courses between birth cohorts (historical time), societies (place), and social groups (social location). Building on the life course paradigm, we explain how key predictors on different levels of analysis can reinforce, precondition, counteract, preclude, or alter each other's influence on family life courses in specific contexts. The proposed framework re-organizes and extends core principles of the life course paradigm into family life course predictors and outcomes on the individual, relational, and population levels. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework with a qualitative case study on family life courses in Senegal and a quantitative case study on family life course change between Baby Boomer and Millennial cohorts in the United States using sequence analysis.

School integration is an important indicator of equality of opportunity and racial reconciliation in contemporary South Africa. Despite its prominence in public and political discourse, however, there is no systematic evidence on the levels and patterns of school segregation. Drawing on the literature on the post-apartheid political settlement and sociological theories of opportunity hoarding, we explain how the small White minority and, to a lesser extent, the new Black middle class monopolized access to South Africa's most prestigious schools following the abolition of de jure segregation in 1994. Using the 2021 Annual School Survey—an administrative dataset covering all South African schools—and the 2019 TIMSS school survey, we find very high levels of school segregation along racial as well as socioeconomic lines. White students almost exclusively attend former White schools, have little exposure to the low-income Black majority, and are vastly overrepresented in elite public and private schools. We argue that in South Africa and other contexts with under-resourced education systems, elite capture of the few high-performing schools serves to reproduce race and class privilege.

Despite the significant political, economic and geographical diversity in China, there is limited research on spatial differences in intergenerational mobility in China. This research aims to fill this gap by exploring the spatial and temporal dimensions of intergenerational educational mobility in China. The data used for the analysis is the 2010–2018 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), a nationally representative longitudinal general social survey. The analysis incorporates both relative and absolute mobility measures to provide a comprehensive description of intergenerational educational mobility. The results reveal substantial regional differences in intergenerational educational mobility across various economic zones in China, with a rising geographic inequality over time. The southwest and northeast regions stand out as the areas where the educational prospects of the young generation have become not only bleaker but dependent more on their parents. Additionally, this study presents the first education Great Gatsby Curve for China, highlighting the strong relationship between intergenerational mobility and education inequality at the regional level, particularly after China's market reform.

Extensive research demonstrates the far-reaching impacts of early childhood development (ECD) interventions, including both pre-primary education (PPE) and in-home nurturing. At the same time, a limited understanding of inequalities in ECD exposure across groups of children in many countries poses a fundamental challenge to effective policymaking. This research investigates key factors driving unequal access to PPE and positive parenting for children in China using data from the nationally representative China Family Panel Studies 2010–2018. The research finds substantial and persistent disparities by children's ethnicity, migration status, household wealth, and mother's education. While mother's education dominates variation in both PPE participation and parenting practices, household wealth and ethnicity strongly influence PPE participation but exert less influence than migration status on positive parenting.

Empirical evidence suggests children's socio-emotional skills—an important determinant of school achievement—vary according to socioeconomic family background. This study assesses the degree to which differences in socio-emotional skills contribute to the achievement gap between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged children. We used data on 74 countries from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment, which contains an extensive set of psychological measures, including growth mindset, self-efficacy, and work mastery. We developed three conceptual scenarios to analyze the role of socio-emotional skills in learning inequality: simple accumulation, multiplicative accumulation, and compensatory accumulation. Our findings are in line with the simple accumulation scenario: socioeconomically advantaged children have somewhat higher levels of socio-emotional skills than their disadvantaged peers, but the effect of these skills on academic performance is largely similar in both groups. Using a counterfactual decomposition method, we show that the measured socio-emotional skills explain no more than 8.8 percent of the socioeconomic achievement gap. Based on these findings, we argue that initiatives to promote social and emotional learning are unlikely to substantially reduce educational inequality.

Social science research on between-group segregation relies heavily on mathematical indices of exposure and unevenness, which tell us very little about the underlying patterns of segregation. We present a new visual method for analyzing two-group and multi-group segregation patterns, which we call a segplot. Segplots provide an intuitive illustration of segregation between schools, neighborhoods, occupations, or other units, adding to the depth and communicability of scholarly research. The visualization shows the entire segregation pattern, as well as the relevant reference distribution used in many measures of segregation. Segplots are particularly useful when comparing patterns of segregation over time, between locations, or between different types of units. For more complex, high-dimensional segregation patterns, we also present an algorithm that can be used to "compress" the pattern to obtain a visually clearer result.

Millennials are often assumed to be economically worse off than previous generations because of more precarious employment and unstable family lives. Using sequence analysis and unconditional quantile decomposition, we analyze the work and family trajectories of late baby boomers and early millennials and relate them to wealth holdings at age 35. We find that the poorest millennials have less wealth than their baby boomer counterparts, but the wealthiest millennials have more. Millennials are less likely to enter high-status occupations and are more likely to work in low-skilled service jobs, and family trajectories show a strong decline of traditional early marriage and parenthood; however, changes in life course trajectories cannot account for the increase in wealth inequality. Instead, the distribution of wealth has become more unequal because the economic returns to typical middle-class trajectories have increased, while the returns to typical working-class trajectories have stagnated or declined.

This study looks at educational inequality in China, a country that has greatly expanded access to education in recent decades. It uses a sequential logit model to study the changing impact of family background on educational transitions, comparing birth cohorts that completed their schooling during different stages of the market transition process. Data are derived from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), a large and nationally representative household survey that provides detailed retrospective information. The findings show that educational inequality in reform-era China followed a pattern of maximally maintained inequality. Although educational expansion diminished disparities in obtaining basic education, inequality persisted or even increased in the more advanced levels, especially at the crucial transition to senior high school. Inequalities only started to decrease for the most recent cohorts, when higher-level transitions became almost universal among high-status groups.

A contentious debate in academic as well as policy circles relates to the growth in private schooling in the Global South. While proponents highlight the superior learning outcomes of pupils in private schools, others have argued that this is merely a reflection of the more advantaged family background of private school pupils, rather than an effect of private schooling itself. We contribute to this debate by providing estimates derived from household fixed-effect models, which control for any observed or unobserved differences between government and private school pupils at the household level. We rely on large-scale, comparable household survey data from Kenya, Uganda, India, and Pakistan, focusing on children enrolled in grades 2–6 of primary school. The findings show that controlling for family background almost eliminates the positive effect of private schooling in rural Pakistan and reduces it by around half in rural India, Kenya, and Uganda, to about a quarter of a standard deviation.

Data from sub-Saharan Africa show that many students leave school without the skills they need. To address this issue, it is important to understand what factors influence learning. According to the Heyneman and Loxley effect established in 1983, in low income countries school quality influences how much students learn more than those students' backgrounds. Recent research suggests that this influential conclusion no longer holds, without discounting the possibility that this trend could still be observed in very-low income countries. The present work investigates this possibility by using the PASEC dataset, which includes ten countries in West- and Central Africa. Improving on Heyneman and Loxley's methodology by using general dominance analysis, this article finds no support for the 'Heyneman-Loxley Effect'. Both school resource and student background account for around half of the explained variance in learning. This suggests that both family- and school-related factors are important sources of inequality of opportunity in low-income contexts.

Influential reports about the "learning crisis" in the global South generally pay insufficient attention to social inequalities in learning. In this study, we explore the association between family socioeconomic status and learning outcomes in 10 francophone African countries using data from the Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems, a standardized assessment of pupils' mathematics and reading competence at the end of primary school. We start by showing that learning outcomes among grade 6 pupils are both poor and highly stratified. We then develop and test a conceptual framework that highlights three mechanisms through which family socioeconomic status might contribute to learning: (1) educational resources at home, (2) health and well-being, and (3) differences in school quality. We find that most of the effect of family background on learning outcomes operates through school quality, which results from a combination of the unequal distribution of resources (such as teachers and textbooks) across schools and high socioeconomic segregation between schools. On the basis of these results, we suggest that most countries in the region could improve equity as well as overall performance by "raising the floor" in school quality.

We compare household income panel data from China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Consistent with previous research, we show that income is more unequally distributed in China than in the three Western countries. But China also has a higher level of intra-generational income mobility. Because mobility tends to have an income-equalizing effect, the snapshot measures of inequality overstate the true level of inequality in China to a greater degree than they do for the other countries. But even after we have taken into account the impact of mobility, permanent income is still more unequally distributed in China than in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Moreover, in the three Western countries, the lion's share of income inequality is between individuals rather than within individual. The opposite holds for China.

Despite an impressive rise in school enrolment rates over the past few decades, there are concerns about growing inequality of educational opportunity in China. In this article, we examine the level and trend of educational mobility in China, and compare them to the situation in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. Educational mobility is defined as the association between parents' and children's educational attainment. We show that China's economic boom has been accompanied by a large decline in relative educational mobility chances, as measured by odds ratios. Relative rates of educational mobility in China were, by international standards, quite high for those who grew up under state socialism. For the most recent cohorts, however, educational mobility rates have dropped to levels that are comparable to those of European countries, although they are still higher than the US level.

The study describes current patterns of intergenerational proximity in China and analyzes the structural conditions that are associated with couples' proximity to the husband's and the wife's parents. Patrilocality is a core aspect of the traditional Chinese kinship system and is deeply rooted in Confucian beliefs. In recent decades, however, this custom has been challenged by internal migration as well as changes in family values and preferences. Using a nationally representative sample of 4,256 couples derived from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies, we find that almost 75% of married Chinese couples live with or in close proximity to the husband's parents. There is, however, a strong social gradient in intergenerational proximity, and patrilocality is particularly pronounced among rural-origin and less-educated couples. Matrilocal residence remains unusual, although it is more likely when the wife has no brothers. The custom of patrilocal residence demonstrates a remarkable resilience, even as other patriarchal traditions have crumbled in the face of China's Great Transformation.

Death and suffering of migrants at Europe's Mediterranean Sea border has become one of the defining moral and political issues of our time. While humanitarian organizations argue that deaths result from Europe's policy of exclusion and closure, those employing a deterrence-oriented narrative have argued for even stricter border controls. Perhaps because of its contentious nature, the debate is often devoid of systematic information on the drivers and dynamics of border deaths. This study contributes to our understanding of border deaths in the Mediterranean region in three ways: it describes and evaluates recent data sources on migration and mortality; it provides a descriptive statistical analysis of absolute and relative mortality risks between 2010 and 2016; and it assesses the relationship between European border policy and border deaths. Our findings challenge the dominant deterrence-oriented policy narrative and highlight the failure of European authorities to address the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

In China, it has historically been the responsibility of sons rather than daughters to provide economic support to older parents. This study used a sample of 12,389 non-coresident children to analyze whether such gender differences persist in contemporary rural China and how they can be explained. A two-part model showed that daughters were somewhat more likely to remit to parents, although sons provided higher amounts. The support of parents by both daughters and sons was found to be strongly related to out-migration and the receipt of grandchild care, but the negative effect of marriage was stronger for daughters. These findings imply a weakening of the traditional gendered division of intergenerational support.

Although the determinants of intergenerational contact have been well documented in Western countries, we know virtually nothing about the situation in China, a country that has recently experienced unprecedented socioeconomic and demographic change. This study analyzed the frequency of visits and other contact (phone, text message, etc.) in a representative sample of 16,715 adult child–parent dyads, focusing in particular on the role of migration as well as children's gender, marital status, and education level. Adult children generally maintained intensive social relations with parents, although distance was a major barrier to face-to-face contact. Sons visited more often than daughters, but daughters were more likely to stay in touch by other means. Moreover, the strength of parent–daughter ties was strongly dependent on education level. These findings suggest that women's empowerment and the spread of mobile technology have created new opportunities for intergenerational solidarity.

China has seen a rapid decline of the traditional multi-generational household and an increase in rural-to-urban migration, raising concerns about a possible breakdown of the informal support system. Against this background, the paper looks at family care-giving (or the absence thereof) to parents in three different living arrangements: with any child or child-in-law (co-resident); independent with at least one child living in the same community (networked); and without any children in either the household or the community (isolated). The findings suggest that married parents are mostly cared for by their spouse, even if they co-reside with adult children. Proximity to children is particularly important for single elders, who are more likely to lack a care-giver when living independently. There appears to be a hierarchy in family care responsibilities, where children step in as care-givers only when the spouse is no longer able to fulfil this role.