Family background and the likelihood of pursuing a university degree abroad: heterogeneity in educational fields

Abstract

This article examines how the likelihood of pursuing higher education abroad varies with social background and how such possible variations differ across educational fields. We use comprehensive Norwegian population data which allow for examining two dimensions of family background: parents’ education level and income. Our analytical sample comprises five cohorts of first-time students aged 19–24 years. We confirm previous findings that students who study abroad come from families with highly educated parents. Additionally, we find that students abroad have wealthier parents. Interestingly, the relationships between the likelihood of studying abroad and family background differ across educational fields. The probability of studying business and administration abroad increases with both parental income and parental education level, whereas it only increases with parental income for fine arts students. For medical students, family background does not correlate with the probability of studying abroad after controlling for grades from upper secondary.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Study abroad
• family background
• economic and cultural capital
• social background
• full-degree international mobility

Acknowledgements

This paper has been written within the project ‘International student mobility: drivers, patterns and impacts’ (MOBILITY). The authors would like to thank all members of the project group for the valuable feedback. Data made available by the Statistics Norway have been essential for this research. The authors would also like to thank their colleagues from the Career group at the Centre for the Study of Professions (SPS), the participants on the HistClass-workshop at the University of Oslo, and Professor Gaute Torsvik from the Department of Economics, University of Oslo, for the great feedback on the early versions of this paper. The authors are grateful for the insightful comments from the referees. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Examples include grades (Andersen and Hansen 2012), choice of educational field (Helland and Wiborg 2019; Seehuus 2019), and parents’ involvement in their children’s schooling (Strømme and Helland 2020).

2 Only full-degree students are included.

3 See https://lovdata.no/dokument/SF/forskrift/2017-01-06-13.

4 See https://lanekassen.no/nb-NO/stipend-og-lan/utland/hoyere-utdanning-i-utlandet/.

5 This group constitutes 78% of the original sample of non-mobile students and 94% of mobile students.

6 Although the administrative data on studies abroad go back to 1986, the educational codes which we use to retrieve the information about education undertaken abroad are less detailed for cohorts before 2006. They contain only a level and a broad field of study (the highest level of aggregation of classification, according to the Norwegian Standard of Classification of Education [NUS2000]), which is insufficient for identifying fine arts, business, and medicine studies.

7 These fields of study could be further divided into sub-fields. However, information on sub-fields is not available for education undertaken abroad. Fine arts studies include a higher variety of different educational programmes than medicine and business studies do (sub-fields within fine arts: domestic crafts, applied art and industrial design; wood, metal, and glass crafts; photography; drawing, graphic arts, painting and sculpture; interior design and display; clothing and textile design; vocal and instrumental music; theatre and film; dance and ballet). It still makes sense to examine these programmes at the aggregate level. We know that there are graduates with an overseas education within all sub-fields of fine arts (Heian, Løyland, and Kleppe 2015). The choice to undertake an education within fine arts is usually made early in life and is often motivated by talent or a special calling to become an artist (Mangset 2004).

8 Including parental income and parental education in the regression simultaneously could lead to a multicollinearity issue, which is undesirable, when an examination of both variables is of interest. Multicollinearity might lead to large standard errors, which would make it difficult to achieve statistically significant and reliable results. However, as shown in Table 3, the standard errors are not altered much when parental income is introduced in the model. A large number of observations makes it possible to still observe sufficient variation in parental income within parental education levels, and vice versa. It could have been more problematic in the case of fewer observations or insufficient variation in the data (Verbeek 2008). Therefore, the model including both parental education and parental income could still provide us with meaningful and reliable results. In addition, correlations among the main explanatory variables are well below 0.8, a conventional cut-off for determining problematic multicollinearity.

9 That status differences are small does not mean they are non-existent. They are small compared to such differences in other countries and have been more connected to certain degrees (e.g. siviløkonom ≈ MBA) than to institutions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council [283545].