In Switzerland educational outcomes of migrants are often inferior compared to autochthonous children. Those findings initiated a controversial discussion of the educational opportunities of immigrants and provide evidence for migrant pupils’ ethnic penalties and the social structure of the inequality of educational opportunities in the Swiss educational system. A crucial point of educational success concerning social origin and ethnicity is the transition from primary to lower secondary school. The theoretical approach of primary and secondary effects of origin assumes that the inequality of educational opportunities is an aggregated result of parents’ socially distinctive estimation about educational benefits and costs, differing prerequisites for school performance that depend on socio-economic origin, and the institutional procedures working at the transition to the secondary school tracks. Our main interest lies in the forming of educational aspirations and perceptions of educational costs and benefits. We link a differentiated definition of the status of immigration and family characteristics, using measures of families’ capital stocks and attitudes on education, as well as school class characteristics in order to examine if and how these variables shape the parents’ educational aspirations and their perception of costs, benefits, and probabilities of educational success. It will be examined how families’ socio-economic and ethnic background affect those aspirations and perceptions. The main question to be answered will be, if such aspirations and perceptions differ between autochthonous and migrant parents and if they could therefore explain differing educational outcomes through differing educational decisions as a secondary effect of social and ethnic origin.

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