Modeling Educational Inequalities: Class, Academic Achievement, and Regional Differences in Turkey

As it has been realized that education is a key to a long-term economic growth and to reducing social and economic disadvantages, educational inequality and its reflections in the geography have become some of the major issues in many countries. Turkey is in many ways a good example to analyze the relations between class, education, and regional inequalities where education is strongly a class-related issue and there has also been a strong dimension of “geography” as far as the educational provision and performance are considered. The purpose of the article is to contribute to two debates on the relation of education and inequality in Turkey. One is a specific and practical way of understanding about the effect of socioeconomic backgrounds of the students on their educational achievement. The other is an understanding on causal relations based on socioeconomic variables and geographical variations and how these lead to or indeed are partly caused by regional inequalities in Turkey. Using the datasets of PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) database, the datasets of National University Entrance Examination and Census, the article finds that for Turkish students where (the region and the place of residence) and with whom (socioeconomic qualifications of parents) they live are the powerful indicators of academic achievement.