Institutional Characteristics of Education Systems and Inequalities: Introduction II

This is the second special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology on the role of education systems as institutional settings on the reproduction of inequalities. The first was published in January 2021 and included papers that explored the role of shadow education and country characteristics during early childhood on educational inequalities. This special issue includes three papers that focus on stratification of the education system as a key driver of educational inequalities, cumulative (dis)advantage in the access to higher education, and student experiences in national educational systems. While we already elaborated on the research program, conceptual framework, and methodological challenges in the first introduction, we will deal with the current state-of-research in this second introduction.