New paper on public support for free tutoring for disadvantaged children published in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

Should free tutoring for socioeconomically disadvantaged children be available to all of them, or only to those who perform poorly at school? In this paper with Guido Mehlkop and Fiona Seiffert, we report a survey experiment with a Germany-wide random sample of adults (N = 1,331). We randomly varied whether free one-on-one tutoring for children from low-income households was offered regardless of academic performance or only to low-performing students. We then measured respondents’ agreement with the policy, its perceived fairness, and how they evaluated parents who use the offer. Support was broad overall, but tying access to poor performance increased agreement, perceived fairness, and positive evaluations of these parents. Left-leaning respondents were consistently more supportive, whereas social dominance orientation and malicious envy were associated with lower support; income and education played only a limited role. Conditionality did not substantially reduce these ideological divides. Our findings suggest that the design of access rules shapes the legitimacy of redistributive education policies, beyond the goals these policies pursue.

Read the paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-026-01099-0