Class Structure and High School Students' Educational Expectations

Abstract

This paper examines the mechanisms of educational inequality, focusing on class structure in terms of the amount and composition of capital. I analyzed families' class position and its relationship to the educational expectations of high school students and their mothers using data from the “Survey among High School Students and their Mothers, 2012” conducted in Japan. The main results are as follows. To explore the structure of social class, I first applied latent class analysis to the variables, indicating students' social background, which consists of parental occupation, education, household income and savings, and cultural possessions in the home. I derived five classes and characterized them by the amount and composition of capital. In effect, I demonstrated the existence of the most advantaged class, with abundant economic and cultural capital, and the disadvantaged class, which has a low level of such capital. In addition, I found two “asymmetric” classes that differ in their relative distribution of these types of capital - one has a high level of cultural capital and a low level of economic capital, and vice versa - as well as one middle class. Second, in addition to the amount of cultural and economic capital, composition affects the educational expectations of students and their mothers. When I compared the educational expectations of the two “asymmetric” classes, the class whose dominant capital is cultural has higher educational expectations than the class whose dominant capital is economic. Third, I confirmed the impact of cultural capital between the upper and middle classes. On the other hand, economic capital strongly influences educational expectations between classes with low levels of cultural capital. In sum, these results indicate that educational inequalities are generated in a very complex way in contemporary society, as reflected by the multidimensional nature of social classes.