Career guidance to lessen inequalities in education: internal evidence from OECD–PISA 2018 data

The students’ socioeconomic background effect on the educational outcomes makes it more difficult to find real equality of opportunity within the educational system. In this paper, we analyse the relationship of career guidance at school with cognitive skills, and also with expectations and motivation for a sample of more than 188,000 15-year-old students in 29 different countries, using the OECD PISA 2018 data. We apply a propensity score matching procedure with a novel multilevel second stage. We provide novel evidence of the positive influence of career guidance on the variables of interest, but only for disadvantaged students.