Tertiary Education, Changing One’s Educational Decision and the Role of Parental Preferences

Bernhard Christoph (), Heike Spangenberg () and Heiko Quast ()
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Bernhard Christoph: Institute for Employment Research (IAB)
Heike Spangenberg: German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW)
Heiko Quast: German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW)

Research in Higher Education, 2024, vol. 65, issue 2, No 4, 283-302

Abstract: Abstract Unequal access to university and the decision processes that give rise to it are important factors in the accumulation of educational inequalities. In this paper, we investigate a specific aspect of such decision processes by focusing on those students who change their original plans to start a (nontertiary) vocational education and decide to pursue a tertiary degree instead. In doing so, we find that more than one-fifth of the students in our sample who originally planned to pursue a vocational education change their original decision in this way. Moreover, while students from a more advantaged background are more likely to go to university in the first place, those among them that initially opted for a vocational education are also more likely to change their decision and go to university instead. We also find that parental preferences for tertiary education play an important role in the process of changing one’s mind, even for adult children. Moreover, we find that differential parental preferences contribute to both the emergence of social background effects and—as a result—the perpetuation of educational inequalities.

Keywords: Social inequality; Educational inequality; Educational decisions; Tertiary education; Vocational education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s11162-023-09752-9

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