The effect of parental education on the expectations of 15 year olds to complete higher education in the Netherlands

Abstract

This paper aims to determine the effect of parental education, as an important measure of social origin, on the expectations of 15 year olds to complete higher education in the Netherlands. More importantly, the paper tests specific explanations for this effect. For the empirical analysis, Dutch data from the PISA 2018 survey were used. The results revealed that there is a considerable impact of parental education on the likelihood of expecting to complete higher education in the Netherlands. To a large extent, this social origin effect refers to secondary effects of stratification: students with the same school performance have different expectations regarding higher education that are strongly correlated with their social origin. Parental resources explain only a small part of the direct social origin effect net of school performance. The secondary effects remain largely unexplained after taking parents’ economic, cultural and educational resources into account, suggesting that relative risk aversion drives social differentials in educational expectations.

Keywords:

• Social origin
• educational expectations
• higher education
• school performance
• parental resources
• the Netherlands

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A multi-national samples approach (or cross-national comparison) based on the PISA to get more (cross-country) variation (in the effect of social origin) on the dependent variables to be analysed would have been possible and has been dealt with previously (Buchmann and Park 2009; Parker et al. 2016), but the focus here is on the understanding of inequality in educational expectations by testing specific (micro-level) explanations for the social origin ­effect in a particular case, that is, the Netherlands, for which the national PISA data offer a good opportunity to do so.

2 Also for a more pragmatic reason, the focus was on parental education, as only a limited measure of social class and no measure of income was available in the PISA 2018 survey.

3 The number of books at home is used in many large-scale assessment studies organized by the OECD (not only in the PISA, but also in the Programme for the International Assesment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) for instance) as a proxy for parents’ cultural resources. However, it has been subject to discussion (Sieben and Lechner 2019), especially since this single-item measure only covers one aspect of cultural capital in the Bourdieusian approach (i.e. objectified cultural capital) and its measurement quality has, apart from its face validity, hardly been systematically scrutinized.