Educational Inequalities and School Dropout in Greece

Abstract

This paper reviews the research pertaining to school termination or “dropping out” of school in Greece. This work provides information on the state of educational policies in Greece dealing with issues of social inequalities and focusing on the increasing phenomenon of school drop out in the country. Educational inequality, as this is expressed in terms of school dropout, seems to persist in Greek education. It seems to be related to the specific characteristics of various regions. We could safely argue therefore, that there is a regional dimension in educational inequality in Greece. For the classification of the 54 regional units in Greece, based on the phenomenon of school drop out, we used the hierarchical cluster analysis with the criterion of Ward for the creation of the clusters that been characterized by the smallest loss of information and the squared Euclidean distance as distance measure between the observations.