Socioeconomic Differences in Parents’ Educational Aspirations and Expectations

Abstract

In this article, we examine the socioeconomic differences in parents’ educational aspirations and expectations. Recent empirical studies have shown that parents’ educational aspirations/expectations construct one of the processes in which inequality of educational opportunity occurs in Japan. On the other hand, some researchers have argued that educational aspirations and expectations are conceptually distinct. In addition, there is a strong association between them. However, only a few studies have explicitly distinguished between educational aspirations and expectations, and none has investigated different effects of independent variables on parents’ educational aspirations and expectations simultaneously. Thus, by using the interdependence model, we examine the effects of socioeconomic backgrounds on parents’ college aspirations and expectations, controlling for the association between the two. The results show that both parents’ college aspirations and expectations are related to parental education, family income and number of children. These results suggest that the socioeconomic differences in parents’ educational aspirations/expectations reflect differences in parents’ wishes and realistic appraisals.