According to the concept of equality of educational opportunity, individuals should have equal opportunities to educate themselves regardless of their family background. However, the educational levels of parents and children often correlates, which has been explained by the association between social origin and school performance, as well as the social origin differences in school continuation decisions. According to previous studies, social origin differences in educational transitions are largest among poorly performing students. A compensatory advantage thesis states that families of high social origin can compensate for negative life events and children’s poor school performance better than those from lower social origins. Previous literature has largely interpreted the findings through the lens of families in higher social positions: how poor success can be compensated with better resources and support from the family. In addition, the literature on resource accumulation has shown that extrafamilial factors, such as the resources of close relatives, can compensate for the family's own resources or even strengthen family background differences.

This dissertation examines how equality of opportunities in higher education is realised in Finland and aims to expand the understanding of why children of highly educated parents end up in higher education and especially university more often than others. The aim of this dissertation is to describe how the dual model of higher education, competition for education places, and parents' heterogeneous environments shape family background differences in higher education transitions. This dissertation consists of three studies utilising statistical regression-based methods and high-quality Finnish register data from Statistics Finland.

The first article focuses on the dual model of the Finnish higher education sector. This study examines enrolment in polytechnics and universities based on parental education and comprehensive school grades. The results show that polytechnics attract particularly well-performing children from lower-educated families diverting them away from universities, while providing a pathway to higher education for below-average-performing children from higher-educated families. In other words, the dual model of higher education divides well-performing students according to their parental education into polytechnics and universities and, in addition, maintains social origin differences in higher education enrolment among below-average-performing children.

The second article focuses on the selectivity and re-applying system of Finnish universities. This study focuses on a large majority of university applicants who do not get accepted on their first attempt. According to the results, children with highly educated parents keep applying to university despite being rejected. The results show that re-application rounds contribute to the overrepresentation of children with highly educated parents at universities. These results enhance the understanding of how children from high social origins utilise second chances compared to others

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The third article examines the association between parental workplace environment and children’s higher education enrolment. This study examines whether the proportion of highly educated employees in a parent’s workplace can moderate the association between parents’ and children’s educational levels. According to the results, children from lower-educated families whose parents work with highly educated co-workers enrol in higher education more often than children from lower-educated families whose parents’ workplaces have few highly educated workers. The results indicate that when family members operate in heterogeneous environments where people from different educational groups meet, the differences in higher education enrolment between children from less- and higher-educated families are smaller.

In summary, equality of opportunity is not fully realised in higher education in Finland, even according to the so-called conservative conception of equality of educational opportunity which calls for utilising the national talent reserve. The dual model and selective admissions exclude both high-achieving children and those with strong educational intentions from lower-educated backgrounds from entering the highest levels of education. Based on the results of this dissertation, it can be estimated that educational decision-making occurs largely in less-educated families. For children from highly educated families, poor school performance, university application rejections, and parents’ homogeneous work environments were smaller factors in transitioning to higher education than for children from less educated families. Although much of the literature focusing on compensatory advantage assumes that privileged families compensate for adversity in their children’s educational paths, the decision to enrol in higher education may, at the same time, be a ‘non-decision’.