Countries differ in their upper secondary school systems in a way that some require their students to choose a specialization from a set of areas - typically natural sciences, economic sciences, humanities or arts - and follow that specialization for the course of their upper secondary education...

Research in the social sciences has focused extensively on the relationship between family background, educational attainment and social destination, on the one hand, and on the processes of skills creation and skills use, on the other. This paper brings these two branches of the literature...