We are excited to announce new SNSF funding for research on educational transitions!
Anne Ardila Brenøe has received Project Funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for the project “Parents, Pressure, and Pathways: Experimental Insights on Swiss Educational Transitions.” The four-year project will begin in August 2026, with a total funding of CHF 975,040.
Understanding how families navigate educational transitions
“Middle childhood and early adolescence are formative years when
aspirations take shape and institutional thresholds begin to determine
opportunities.
We want to understand how families navigate these
moments — and whether carefully thought out policies can reduce the
inequalities that arise along the way.”
Switzerland’s tracked school system requires families to make consequential decisions about their children’s education at a young age. These decisions are shaped by parental beliefs, social norms, and access to information — and they can have lasting effects on children’s academic trajectories, career prospects, and well-being.
The project aims to understand how families navigate these high-stakes transitions and to develop evidence-based tools that can support more equitable outcomes. Using field experiments and large-scale survey and administrative data from the Canton of Zurich, the research will examine the role of parental expectations, gender norms, and information frictions in shaping educational choices. A core part of the project also investigates how selective school admission affects adolescent mental health — a question with broad implications for the design of education systems.
A collaborative research effort
The project is a collaboration with Kai Barron (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) and will support a team of doctoral researchers. By combining experimental methods with institutional data, the project seeks to generate actionable insights for schools, families, and policymakers.