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The dissertation addresses one of the key challenges of today’s schools: the educational gap between minority and majority youth. It has five main purposes: (1) to describe minority educational disadvantage longitudinally and comparatively; and to develop an explanatory approach from identity threat vs. protection at the micro-level of (2) quality of intergroup relations in school and (3) minority identity strategies, and at the macro-level of (4) school segregation and (5) national educational systems. Research groups and settings are the Turkish and Moroccan second generation in Belgium, Sweden, Austria and Germany. School success comprises school careers, adjustment, and test performance. Data sources are large-scale cross-national surveys of the second generation and an additional field experiment in Belgian schools. The dissertation consists of five empirical chapters (Chapters 2-6), an introduction and a conclusion. (1) The first descriptive aim is addressed in (retrospective) longitudinal and comparative analyses of a widening gap between minority and non-minority school careers. Even minority students who started at the academic level are less likely than most similar majority peers to stay on in, and continue beyond, secondary education at each transition (chapter 2). This is replicated across differentially stratified school systems in four countries (chapter 3). The explanatory approach derives and tests four explanatory grounds from an identity threat vs. protection approach of the school environment. (2) The quality of intergroup relations supports minority school success across school contexts, in line with a hypothesized identity protection function of intergroup friendship and support in minority school careers (Chapters 2-4). Also across school contexts, the reduced quantity and quality of intergroup contact in more segregated schools fully mediates the association of school segregation with poor school performance and adjustment (Chapter 4). (3) Minority identity strategies play a key role so that a bicultural identity increases vulnerability to identity threat in the Belgian intergroup context, where bicultural minority students were least successful in the presence of discrimination experiences (Chapter 5) and under situationally-induced stereotype threat (Chapter 6). Finally, comparisons across local and national school contexts evinced the expected lower levels of minority school success in more threatening contexts: (4) in more highly segregated schools (Chapters 2-4); (5) at later stages in the school career (Chapter 2) and in more rigidly stratified school systems (Chapter 3). To conclude, combined longitudinal and comparative analyses of minority (vs. non-minority) school careers reveal the decisive role of selection processes after entry into secondary school in the different school systems. Most importantly, the studies provide converging evidence of identity threat vs. protection implications of the ways in which societies organize intergroup relations in school. Specifically, the dissertation articulates the interplay of minority identities with the quality of intergroup relations in the immediate school environment, which is embedded within differentially segregated and stratified school systems at the societal level

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