Abstract

Studying educational opportunities has a long tradition in sociological inequality research and many sociologists have argued that education is the key variable when researching stratification in present-day societies. More than in the past, education has become a lifelong process where the individual acquires skills and competences in formal and non-formal learning settings throughout the entire life-span. To adequately understand what is happening in educational careers and their role for successful integration into the labor market, longitudinal analyses are necessary. In other words, in modern societies there is a clear need for both more appropriate analytical and methodological approaches in order to understand the longitudinal logic of educational pathways through the life course and to determine how they lead to different outcomes.
The aim of the eduLIFE project was therefore to study how individuals’ educational careers unfold over the live course in relation to family background, educational institutions, workplaces, and private life events. The project took an explicit life course perspective where the movement of individuals through the educational system is seen as the central objective of study, both as a phenomenon to be explained and as a determinant of subsequent economic and non-economic outcomes. Based on the most recent cross-national comparisons and national longitudinal datasets the eduLIFE project did both, (a) established the generality of findings and (b) studied the specific impact of variations in educational institutional settings across countries.
The main goal of the current project is to bring together the main results of the eduLIFE project and to bridge the specific phases of life course educational careers together. Additionally, the project explicitly summarizes the results for Russia, which has been often neglected by the large-scale comparative projects. Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet era constituted an important part of the eduLIFE project . The analyses for Russia were based on the longitudinal data from the Russian Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) and the Education and Employment Survey for Russia (EES), and the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS). The time-span covered the years between 1965 and 2013.