Abstract
Educational aspirations can be regarded as a predictor of final educational attainment, rendering this construct highly relevant for analysing the development of educational inequalities in panel data settings. In the context of the German tracked secondary school system, we analysed school-track effects on the development of educational aspirations. Using data from five consecutive waves of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we selected a sample of high-performing students with initially high aspirations. Our results indicate that pupils in the nonacademic track or with a low social origin tend to lower their aspirations significantly more often than pupils in the academic track or pupils with a high social origin. With mediation analyses, we demonstrate that these differences can be attributed to learning environments at the school level. We also show that the downward adjustment of aspirations in the nonacademic track is less pronounced for students from highly educated families than for students from low-education family backgrounds.
Highlights
Fair access to education for all social classes is undoubtedly an ideal for most modern societies
The rationale behind these reforms was to open up channels into higher levels of education even for those pupils who do not transition into the academic pathway at the beginning of secondary education right away
Our concern was that— these measures were intended to reduce the level of social inequality in educational attainment—they could have produced some unintended side effects that work to counter this behaviour target and contribute to the maintenance of inequalities instead
Summary
Fair access to education for all social classes is undoubtedly an ideal for most modern societies. High-performing but risk-averse students who otherwise would have opted for the more demanding academic route might be diverted into the less risky sequential alternative of starting in a lower track first and upgrading to upper-secondary education after reaching a first lower-level credential. This diversion process has adverse effects whenever attending a lower-level track instead of the academic track is connected to influences that cause the student to abandon the initial plan of attaining an upper-secondary credential
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