In many Western countries, researchers have documented ‘immigrant optimism’ in education, i.e., the tendency for immigrant-background students to choose academically more demanding routes than others at given levels of grade point averages (GPA). For some, this indicates structural integration, while others alert against an ‘immigrant optimism trap’ when ambition trumps ability, leading to high risks of non-completion. Using longitudinal Swedish population data (n≈90,000), we estimate the upper secondary ‘completion gap’ to 12% to the detriment of immigrant-background students. We then address the ‘trap hypothesis’ via two counterfactual analyses. The first shows that if immigrant-background youth made similar educational choices as other students at the same GPA, the completion gap would shrink by 3.4 percentage points. The second analysis suggests that restricting admission to programmes based on prior GPA, which would lead to a massive relocation of low- and mid-GPA students to vocational programmes, would reduce the completion gap by 2.2 percentage points. These changes must be considered marginal in view of the substantial restrictions of choice that either of these measures would entail. We conclude that completion gaps are not primarily a result of immigrant optimism, and optimistic choices are likely to be a net positive for structural integration.

This article explores religious adaptation among immigrant-origin youth in Norway. To capture different dimensions of religious change, we distinguish between 1) level of religiosity, measured by religious salience and religious practices, and 2) social forms of religious belief, measured as the level of rule orientation and theological exclusivism. We compare immigrant-origin youth in Norway with young people in their parents’ origin countries. We then compare immigrant-origin youth who were born in Norway to those who were born abroad and according to their parents’ length of residence in Norway. As expected, immigrant-origin youth from outside Western Europe—and those originating in Muslim countries in particular—were more religious than native and western-origin youth and more rule oriented and exclusivist in their religious beliefs. However, our results suggest that a process of both religious decline and religious individualization is underway among immigrant origin youth in Norway, although this process appears to unfold slower for Muslims than for non-Muslims. The level and social forms of religiosity among immigrant-origin youth are partially linked to their integration in other fields, particularly inter-ethnic friendships.

The authors compare mental well-being among young adults with ethnic minority and majority background before and after the onset of the Covid pandemic in Germany. Overall, they find no signs of declines in young adults’ mental well-being at the early stage of the pandemic, and that changes were mostly similar across ethnic groups. Respondents’ mental well-being was (on average) worse when they were younger. Nevertheless, increased ethnic discrimination and health worries are serious problems among some ethnic minorities.

This chapter (in Swedish) describes structural, cultural, and social integration, and psychological adaptation, of immigrant-background youth in Sweden.

We explore identity formation among adolescents in Norway, and show that immigrant origin youth gradually adopt a stronger self-identity as Norwegians, regardless of regional origins and religious affiliation. However, while adolescents of European immigrant origin report that others see them as being even more “Norwegian” than they identify themselves, children of immigrants from Africa and Asia report that others see them as being far less “Norwegian” than how they identify themselves. Non-recognized national identity – the product of an asymmetrical relationship between self-identity and ascription – is most common among well-established minority groups, and we show that both ethno-racial origins and religious affiliation are major hurdles for acceptance. Ethnic identities associated with the parental homeland, which are closely related to religion, are more stable, and only very weakly related to the formation of a national identity.

The authors examine cross-national variation in the ethnic gradient in aspirations among 14-year-olds in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden by using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries, collected in 2009/2010. Results show that most ethnic minority groups are more likely to have university aspirations than ethnic majority youth. The most consistent minority advantage is found in England and Sweden, consistent with the interpretation that the ample scope for choice in progression through these school systems allows high ambitions of minorities to play out well. However, minority advantage of some groups is also present in the Netherlands and Germany, where transitions are more heavily conditional on previous performance. The pattern for immigrant generational status varies across countries and ethnic origins. There is no consistent empirical evidence indicating that aspiration differences between ethnic minority and majority youth will diminish due to assimilation processes across the generations.

This study addresses the question to what extent language skills among students are influenced by the composition of the overall classroom context and the composition of friendship networks within school classes. Furthermore, it asks whether the effects differ between stratified school systems, with a more homogenous student body in school classes, and comprehensive school systems, with a more heterogeneous student body. Focusing only on classroom characteristics, we find positive effects of the socioeconomic and cognitive overall composition of the school class in Germany’s selective school system, but not in Sweden’s comprehensive system. In contrast, the ethnic composition does not matter significantly in any of the systems, while direct peer interactions, captured with social networks measures targeting friends in a school class, matter slightly more in Sweden’s comprehensive school system