Educational trajectories in Austria: A descriptive longitudinal sequence analysis of a full student cohort

This study provides a comprehensive longitudinal description of educational trajectories in Austria, using administrative data for an entire student cohort. This offers new insights into how early social differences translate into divergent pathways. Since education both shapes lifetime outcomes and reproduces persistent inequalities along dimensions of social origin, gender, ethnicity, and geography analysing educational trajectories is central to understanding social mobility.

We follow a full cohort of students in Austrian schools who were 13 years old on 1 September 2011 (N = 85,535). School, higher education, labour market, migration, and residence data are combined to map trajectories across stages of education and labour market entry from age six to 23. Sequence analysis is applied to visualise trajectories, identify the most common pathways, and examine variation by sociodemographic and structural characteristics.

Results show that social inequalities emerge early and widen across educational stages, with the largest differences observed by parental education: students from highly educated families more often follow academic pathways while those from less educated families are more likely to enter vocational tracks. Variation is also observed by gender, migration background and place of residence. Overall, these findings provide a population-level perspective on the early emergence and persistence of educational inequalities in Austria.