Be true to your school: School profiling and school sorting by socio-economic status

Many national education systems have schools that adopt distinctive elements like alternative pedagogical concepts or specialty themes. This “school profiling” is suggested to drive school segregation by socio-economic status (SES). Since most existing research has focused on U.S. charter schools and lacks large-scale student-level data, the connection between profiling and SES-based school sorting remains unclear. This study addresses this gap by focusing on the case of the Netherlands, a country known for its high school autonomy and freedom of school choice. I use population-wide register data from over 110,000 students (aged 11–12), linked to novel data on school profiling. The findings reveal social stratification in access to schools with distinctive profiles, with higher-SES students having access to a more diverse pool of schools. Furthermore, conditional logit models show evidence of self-sorting by SES for some profiles: for instance, schools with progressive learning concepts are less popular among lower-SES students, while higher-SES students are comparatively less likely to choose labor market-themed schools. These SES disparities, however, are modest and not always in the expected direction. Overall, findings underscore the role of access disparities in shaping SES-based sorting, next to differential preferences for schooling.