Vocational schools in Eastern Europe generally play an important role as paths to higher education (Frommberger 2019). In Bulgaria up to 90% of students in some vocational education and training programmes (e.g. in economics) continue their education in higher education immediately after graduation (Terziev et al. 2025). However, even though all general and vocational secondary schools enable access to higher education (HE), both academic and vocational programmes at the upper secondary education level are differentiated (Boyadjieva & Ilieva-Trichkova 2019). Vocational schools, which until recently used to accommodate half of youth, differ not only in relation to their programmes, but also in the selectivity of their access procedures, quality of teaching and prestige (ibid.). Against the background of extensive social selection and reproduction in the access to HE in Bulgaria (Ilieva-Trichkova & Boyadjieva 2014), it remains unclear to what extent vocational schools and academic achievements compensate or reinforce social inequality in university access, and if boys and girls benefit equally from the permeability between vocational and HE. We therefore ask (1) how various upper secondary school types in Bulgaria differ in respect to their social composition with regard to its pupils’ social origin and gender, and (2) how likely these school types and the academic achievements of their students are to result in higher education entrance if social composition is taken into account. Conceptually, the study links different institutional characteristics (selection principles, quality of teaching, programme orientation) of upper-secondary school types (Boyadjieva & Ilieva-Trichkova 2019) to gender and social origin. We analyse the nationally-representative Bulgarian School-Leavers Survey (N=2100), carried out in 2014 (Imdorf & Stoilova 2017), and apply bi-variate descriptive and logistic regression analyses. Preliminary results show a considerable variation in transition patterns to HE according to the general and vocational school types which moderate the effects of pupils’ social origin, gender and academic achievement on their transition to HE. Semi-profiled non-selective general schools and vocational schools without exam are more socially inclusive, especially for boys from non-academic families. However, these two school types have different HE-access chances. Compared to the average of graduates who enrol in HE (48%), the respective share among those from vocational schools without exam is especially low with 24 percentage points. In contrast, the share of pupils from semi-profiled non-selective schools corresponds approximately to the average. The findings are discussed in the context of more recent trends in the Bulgarian education system.

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