The perceived quality, fairness of and corruption in education in Europe

ABSTRACT

Although education is arguably one of the most central institutions in contemporary European societies, only recently scholars have started to study opinions that relate to the perceived legitimacy of education among the public at large. This paper contributes to this emerging literature. Based on data from the most recent wave of the European Quality of Life Survey (N = 23,073; 30 countries) we assess what individual- and country-level factors predict citizens’ satisfaction with educational quality and the perceived fairness of/corruption in education. At the individual level, we find that indicators of one’s material vs. educational position are inversely related to the perceived quality, fairness, and corruption of the education system. At the macro level, it turns out that in countries that perform better on PISA tests the perceived educational quality is higher and the perceived corruption lower. In the conclusion we elaborate on the implications of our findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceived quality of education
• perceived fairness of education
• system justification theory
• European Quality of Life Survey
• multilevel analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2022.2136152

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bram Spruyt

Bram Spruyt is associate professor of Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium) and chair of the research group TOR (https://torvub.be/). His main research interests include the sociology of education, public opinion research, and the study of social inequalities. His earlier research has been published in journals like British Journal of Sociology of Education, Educational Researcher, and Teaching and Teacher Education.

Filip Van Droogenbroeck

Filip Van Droogenbroeck is assistant professor at the Data Analytics Lab of the Business Technology & Operations Department and member of the research group Tempus Omnia Revelat in the Sociology department at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His main research interests include sociology of youth, sociology of education, and the cross-fertilization between social science & machine learning.

Leandros Kavadias

Leandros Kavadias is a Ph.D. candidate, research group TOR, Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels. His main fields of interest are comparative cultural sociology, comparative historical institutions, and sociology of education. He is currently conducting research on measuring and mapping the increased centrality of (mass) schooling and the analysis of its societal consequences from a global perspective.