Abstract
Educational research on university transitions has repeatedly highlighted that inequalities related to cultural origin still persist even though intergenerational upward mobility has been facilitated over the last fifteen years due to the huge enrollment rates documented across countries in the Western world. In contrast to this line of research in which differences between social or cultural groups are investigated, the unit of analysis in this article is a demographically homogeneous group of families in which the parents invest in university studies as the main route for their children’s post-18 pathways. Through a variable-based research design we explore the conditions which affect high-school students’ motives for following university studies. The main finding has to do with the fact that it is how late or early students make their decision that is the factor differentiating the families within this group and affecting the students’ transition to university.
Highlights
Three variants of sociologically-oriented educational research Since the sixties, the social-class conditions affecting the transition to higher education have constituted one of the much-debated issues in educational studies as far as the sociological and socio-psychological fields are concerned (Devine, 2004; Gambetta, 1987)
Educational research on university transitions has repeatedly highlighted that inequalities related to cultural origin still persist even though intergenerational upward mobility has been facilitated over the last fifteen years due to the huge enrollment rates documented across countries in the Western world
Given that our sample is composed of students whose parents’ cultural capital predisposes them for university studies, one has to examine how this decision is formed within a group which is “homogeneous”, as we have shown from the main demographic findings
Summary
Three variants of sociologically-oriented educational research Since the sixties, the social-class conditions affecting the transition to higher education have constituted one of the much-debated issues in educational studies as far as the sociological and socio-psychological fields are concerned (Devine, 2004; Gambetta, 1987). The reason for this has been repeatedly highlighted and concerns the fact that holding a higher education degree impacts one’s occupational, social or health status (Dudal, Verhaest & Bracke, 2018; Morley, 2012) and that by mediating between class origin and occupational destination it can reduce (or not) the reproduction of inequalities across generations. Women make up 52% of new entrants into tertiary education
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