Abstract
This study investigates the effect of parental aspirations gap on children’s educational attainment between 2007 and 2014, using two waves of Indonesian Family Life Survey data. The aspirations gap is measured by the difference between one’s future reference point and his or her current life evaluation reported by each household head and spouse. The results show that boys whose fathers report a moderate level of the aspirations gap achieve substantially longer schooling years than the mean level of their same age cohort. Furthermore, the relationship is found to be inversely U-shaped, implying that an excessive aspirations gap discourages investment in children’s human capital. An increasing aspirations gap of parents is also found to impede the educational attainment of children in poor families, which are more vulnerable to shocks that are found to increase the gap. Overall, the results of this paper shed light on the role of parental aspirations gap in the link between socioeconomic status of family and educational outcomes of children in Indonesia, where the gap of the poor is found to increase faster than the rich.
Highlights
The relationship between socioeconomic status of family and educational outcomes of children is one of the most robust patterns in educational scholarship
Assuming education decisions are primarily made by household heads, we focus on the aspirations gap of household heads
Under the paradigm of the neoclassical economics, persistent poverty is driven by constraints that are only external to individuals in the form of resource constraints
Summary
The relationship between socioeconomic status of family and educational outcomes of children is one of the most robust patterns in educational scholarship. The investment in human capital is an important tool for reducing poverty, but aspirations failure of the poor household heads may lead to underinvestment in their children’s education. The growth rates of both absolute and relative education years of children are much lower in the poor households between 2007 and 2014 (Fig. 3).4 Motivated by these seemingly incongruent findings, we attempt to answer three questions in this study: (1) Does the higher aspirations gap of parents lead to a greater investment in children’s human capital? It presents and explains two main variables of interest, the aspirations gap and schooling of children.
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