Over the last years, the educational opportunities of immigrant children in Switzerland (as much as in most European Countries) have been discussed controversial with respect to the integration of children and adolescents having migration experience. The educational outcomes of migrants and their children, often inferior compared to autochthonous children, provide evidence for their “ethnic penalties” and the social structure of the inequality of educational opportunities in the Swiss schooling system, even when it is controlled for individual achievement and performance. A crucial point of educational success concerning social origin and ethnicity is the transition from primary education to different tracks of secondary schooling (which in most Swiss Cantons is taking place after the 6th grade). Regarding this transition, many groups of migrants are disadvantaged concerning educational success. Educational success not only depends on individual characteristics and abilities but on performance evaluations and screening decisions of schools as well. The interrelation of these institutional characteristics, family resources, educational choices, individual abilities and educational inequality remains yet unexplained for the Swiss case. From the structural-individual perspective it is assumed that the interrelation of educational opportunities and both, the primary and secondary effects of social and ethnic origin for educational success are the main mechanisms resulting in the inequality of educational opportunities to the disfavour of migrants and their offspring. This theoretical approach assumes that the inequality of educational opportunities is the aggregated result of parents’ socially distinctive beliefs about the benefits and costs of education, prerequisites for school performance that depend on origin, and the institutional procedures working at the transition to the secondary school tracks. In more recent studies this approach suggested by Boudon (1974) has been also applied in order to analyze ethnic inequalities. The rationale behind this argument is that migrant children are disadvantaged regarding language skills and therefore school performance (primary effects) on the one hand. Due to negative selectivity of immigration their parents often provide low economic and cultural resources. Apart from the fact that they are less informed about the opportunities in the Swiss educational system and, in particular, about the procedures of educational transition, their investment in their offsprings’ education is suboptimal due to the limits of their capital (secondary effects) on the other hand.

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