There is an abundance of studies showing that even when educational selection processes are “meritocratically” set up (e.g. standardised, based on achievement), a student’s socioeconomic background still influences the track or stream a student is allocated to (Mijs, 2016, p.18). Yet, there are few studies (e.g. Spruyt, 2015) looking at the way in which people perceive the fairness of educational opportunities. Access to educational opportunities can be conceptualised as “fairness capital”, made out of dimensions related to both societal and personal circumstances (Thomas, 2021).

This article investigates the way in which people educated in different types of educational systems perceive the fairness of educational opportunities in their countries. Thus, this research addresses the following question: How do people with different education levels from Germany and Romania perceive the fairness of educational opportunities in their countries?

Using data from round 9 of the European Social Survey, I look at perceptions of fairness regarding educational opportunities in Germany and Romania. Romania and Germany were selected because they belong to different educational regimes (Dumas et al., 2013). In Germany, there is a relatively strong link between educational qualifications and labour market positions (Allmendinger, 1989), although there are also large social background effects on track allocation in secondary school (Skopek & Leopold, 2020). Inequality has increased in Germany since the beginning of the 2000s, which has been accompanied by a rising share of affluent individuals who believe their society is unfair (Sachweh and Sthamer, 2019). Romania is a post-socialist country that has recently experienced growing levels of inequality, currently being one of the most unequal countries in the EU in terms of income disparities (Precupetu, 2013).

This article explores individuals’ perceptions about the fairness of opportunities for everyone in their country to assess the level of legitimacy attributed to educational systems in Germany and Romania. Moreover, the paper investigates how individuals perceive their own opportunities relative to others in their country, with the aim to infer the satisfaction levels of individuals with different education levels regarding their relative chances to gain the education level sought.

Empirically, research is inconclusive on how education level affects perceptions of meritocracy (Duru-Bellat & Tenret, 2012).  Therefore, Mijs (2016) warns that the approach to studying meritocratic beliefs in terms of (universal) human psychology is rather narrow. Instead, he suggests that researchers should explore how different institutional configurations contribute to shaping individuals’ perceptions of meritocracy. Research by Lavrijsen and Nicaise (2016) suggests that opinions about the fairness of opportunities differ significantly between countries. Cross-national variation in perceptions of fairness might be explained by differences in the structure of opportunities in different countries, and the visibility of unfair (dis)advantages.

The visibility of educational privilege could be influenced by the forms of capital that constitute educational privilege. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) argue that privilege is mostly noticed in its crudest forms, as help with schoolwork, but the essential part of cultural capital is passed on more discretely. Their work talks about the visibility of privilege to external observers, but does not touch on individuals’ awareness of their own privilege. This paper will look at people’s perceptions of their own privilege, as well as the extent to which they evaluate opportunities for other people in their countries as fair.

In order to identify barriers that stand in the way of a fair distribution of educational opportunities, this paper focuses on the opinions of elite students from Germany and Romania. Based on semi-structured interviews, this paper will further answer the question: How do elite students from Germany and Romania conceptualise educational privilege and the barriers to fairly rewarding talent and effort in their countries?

The study draws on two different types of data –survey data and in-depth interviews with people educated in Germany and Romania. The research interest is to examine: a) evaluations about the fairness of educational opportunities in Germany and Romania, and b) people’s conceptualisations of privilege and the factors that make educational opportunities unfair. This paper looks at perceptions of fairness regarding educational opportunities, collected in round 9 of the European Social Survey, in 2018-2019. Respondents were asked to choose the extent to which they agreed with the following statements: “Compared to other people in my country, I have had a fair chance to achieve the level of education I was seeking”; “Overall everyone in [country] has a fair chance of achieving the level of education they seek”. The first question measures self-regarding (egocentric) evaluations of fairness, while the second measures other-regarding (sociotropic) evaluations of fairness (Schnaudt et al., 2021). To explore why patterns in perceived fairness of educational opportunities vary between the two countries, I conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students who study social sciences at Russell Group universities and who went to school in either Germany or Romania. As they required high grades to get into prestigious universities, these individuals have an insider’s perspective into what it takes to successfully navigate the requirements of the school systems in which they were educated. Social science students are generally more aware of social inequalities than people studying different subjects (Duru-Bellat & Tenret, 2012), so they are more likely than students from other disciplines to provide elaborated accounts of how privilege is manifested and what barriers come in the way of rewarding talent and effort. During the interviews, I asked participants about their opinions of the overall fairness of educational chances, and about the extent to which they think their educational system rewards talent and effort. Thus, the methodological approach draws on quantitative data to conduct a population-level analysis of fairness evaluations, and qualitative data to bring out different interpretations of educational privilege. To compare the way in which people in different countries evaluate theirs and others’ educational opportunities, I construct a variable named “perceived privilege”. This variable records the difference between the perceived fairness of respondents’ own chances to gain the educational level sought, and the perceived fairness of chances for everyone else in their country.

The average score of perceived fairness of educational opportunities varies considerably between the two countries. On a scale of 0 to 10, the average score of perceived fairness of opportunities for everyone in Romania (4.64) is the lowest among all European countries. In Germany, the average score of perceived fairness of educational opportunities for everyone is 6.34. In both countries, for most educational categories, the mode of perceived privilege is 0. This means it is common for people to perceive they had as fair chances as everyone else in their country, regardless of their education level. However, among Germans with higher education, the mode of perceived privilege is 3, which indicates that highly educated respondents from Germany perceive there is a notable discrepancy between the educational opportunities they benefitted from, as compared to other people in their country. The average scores of perceived privilege among people with higher education is very similar in Romania and Germany. Hence, higher education graduates from both countries tend to perceive educational opportunities as polarised. Some students from Romania argue that economic capital is a threat to background fairness in their educational system. Participants from Germany understand the barriers to rewarding talent and effort as mostly related to cultural capital and to the very entrenched ways of preparing for and during Gymnasium. While Romanian participants identify more explicit manifestations of privilege – material resources and developmental opportunities, German participants identify more implicit ways in which privilege operates, usually through learning from parents how to study, communicate, and channel their effort effectively. In line with Bourdieu’s (1986) argument that the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital is less visible and less condemned by others than economic capital, we can argue that unfairness of educational opportunities is less visible in Germany than in Romania.

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