Unequal Educational Opportunities in Europe: To What Extent Do Circumstances Beyond Effort Matter?

This paper aims to assess how much of the variation in student achievement across Europe can be attributed to circumstances beyond individual control, namely family socioeconomic status and national context. Using PISA 2022 microdata for 32 European countries combined with macro-level indicators of economic development – GDP per capita, teacher salary, poverty and income inequality – we show that roughly one-fifth of performance differences are explained by these circumstances. Family background plays a central role, while the country of birth alone accounts for about 15% of the variation in outcomes. Distributional analysis using unconditional quantile regression reveals heterogeneous effects: socioeconomic status exerts stronger benefits among higher-achieving students, GDP per capita has a positive effect across the distribution with a higher impact in the middle and upper percentiles, and poverty consistently depresses outcomes, with the negative effect more pronounced among lower-achieving students. These findings demonstrate that both micro- and macro-level conditions systematically reinforce educational inequalities in Europe, showing that individual effort cannot by itself offset the disadvantages imposed by unequal opportunities linked to family background and national context.