Ethnic preferences, opportunity structures, and the school segregation process

Abstract Previous research has shown that parents often have strong ethnicity-related school preferences, and it has been suggested that these preferences are consequential for the ethnic segregation of schools. In this article, we study all students enrolled in compulsory schooling in the Stockholm region during the years 2008 to 2017. Using a combination of statistical analyses of school choices and large-scale, empirically calibrated simulations, we investigate how preferences and opportunities jointly influence the students’ mobility between schools and the school segregation that their mobility or lack thereof gave rise to. Our main finding is that opportunities generally outweigh preferences. While ethnicity-related school preferences exist, they have little impact on ethnic segregation because the schools that students move between tend to have similar ethnic compositions.