Abstract
This paper aims to clarify the changes in the relationship between parents' and their children's educational attainments under educational expansion. Although education is one of the most important variables in social stratification research, the detailed qualitative relationships between parents' and their children's educational attainments were unclear except that the children were more likely to be highly educated if their parents were also highly educated. There is no established theory about the value of educational credentials of specialized training colleges or twoyear junior colleges during the period of educational expansion. Therefore, in order to consider the three-way relationship (father, mother, and respondent) of simultaneous educational attainments, I created the predominant pattern of educational attainments with the latent class analysis using SSM-Japan 2005 data. In addition, I employed multinomial logit latent class analyses to clarify the social backgrounds of each latent class. As a result, regardless of cohort and gender, three latent class models fit the data well. These latent classes generally supported the hypotheses that inequality had been maintained during the period of educational expansion and that the educational expansion actually implied the changes in the threshold of progression to higher education because the distribution of ascendancy to the progression to higher education had been stable. In addition, the three latent classes were clearly distinguishable on the basis of fathers' occupation and cultural property. Most male and female graduates from specialized training colleges belonged to the class of high school graduates, and although junior college graduates belonged to the class of university graduates in the beginning, these two graduates were later separated into different classes.
