Twenty years ago the Swedish school system underwent serious change in that students were given the right to choose their school, though those living near each school had priority. Since then, there has been a new geographical debate concerning where students live and go to school and possible implications of this on student educational achievement and educational equality, as well as on students’ daily lives. In studies of changes in the school system, traveldistances to school have so far been less studied in the Swedish context. In this paper we will analyze the changes in distance to school for 15-year-olds, from 2000 to 2006, in order to identify who, and in which context, is traveling shorter/longer distances, and thus performing a school choice. We use register data from the database PLACE, Uppsala University. The focus is not on effects on achievement, nor school composition, but instead on the difference in ability/possibility of using school choice as measured by distance. A time-geography approach concerning variation in constraints between students is used. School choice may be a matter of preference for certain schools, but importantly, it might also be a matter of time and space restrictions for families with fewer resources; that is, with less spatial capital and a limited opportunity structure. Results show that travel to schooldistances have increased since the year 2000. Foreign-born students are traveling shorter distances, except for those with highly educated parents. Shorter distances are also travelled by students from families with social assistance and for visible minorities in areas where such minorities exist.
The extent to which socioeconomic (dis) advantage is transmitted between generations is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. However, few studies have investigated whether there is a spatial dimension to this intergenerational transmission of (dis) advantage. Drawing on the concept of neighbourhood biographies, this study contends that there are links between the places individuals live with their parents and their subsequent neighbourhood experiences as independent adults. Using individual-level register data tracking the whole Stockholm population from 1990 to 2008, and bespoke neighbourhoods, this study is the first to use sequencing techniques to construct individual neighbourhood histories. Through visualisation methods and ordered logit models, we demonstrate that the socioeconomic composition of the neighbourhood children lived in before they left the parental home is strongly related to the status of the neighbourhood they live in 5, 12 and 18 years later. Children living with their parents in high poverty concentration neighbourhoods are very likely to end up in similar neighbourhoods much later in life. The parental neighbourhood is also important in predicting the cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods over a long period of early adulthood. Ethnic minorities were found to have the longest cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods. These findings imply that for some groups, disadvantage is both inherited and highly persistent.
In recent years, structural changes to the school system, including the introduction of independent schools, have increased school choice alternatives in Sweden. Consequently, a large share of today's students attend a school other than the one closest to home. Since the compulsory school system is designed to be free of charge and to offer the same standard of education everywhere, increasing school choice- hypothetically-should not increase the between-school variation in grades. In reality, however, between-school variation in grades has increased in recent years. The aim of this paper is to test whether increasing between-school variance can be explained by changes in residential patterns, or if it must be attributed to structural change. Using a counterfactual approach, the students' variations in grades are compared between observed schools of graduation and hypothetical schools of graduation. The multilevel results indicate that school choice seems to increase between-school variation of grades.
Several studies have analysed the relationships between individuals' commuting distances and individual characteristics, discrimination, societal structure and planning. Largely left unexplored, however, are the long-term relationships between changes in the economic cycle and the effects on individual commuting distances. Using regression analyses, this study focuses on the relationship between changes in GDP and commuters' response reflected in commuting distances. The empirical data consist of records of almost 12 million Swedish commuting events between 1990 and 2006. Results of the analyses indicate that changes in GDP growth rate have an impact on commuting distances, especially for younger workers, the recently unemployed and commuters in metropolitan areas.