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Abstract
We focus on transition from school or employment to university and analyze how social network characteristics and the quantity of social capital (SC) influence the assessment of help in selecting a program of study. We analyze data of undergraduate students at a German university and find that SC has an amount and a context effect. First, we assume that in networks where students find a lot of SC, they also receive helpful advice. Second, a social network close to academia offers useful help. Our multivariate analyses support the context effect, but also indicate a marginal utility of SC. Students with academically educated parents rate their parents’ help as more useful, and students with studying friends rate their friends’ advice as helpful. However, students who are rich in SC among family and friends rate their help lower than students who are rich in SC among only one part of their network.
Acknowledgments
An early version of this article was presented at the workshop ‘Research on Social Networks in School and University Contexts’, which was held at the University of Bremen. We thank all participants for their helpful comments.
Notes
1. For more information about the German vocational education system, see, for example, Hoeckel and Schwartz (Citation2010).
2. The varying availability of social capital in both groups is primarily a consequence of differing group composition regarding the social capital in the family – especially of diverging socio-economic background – and, considering the social capital among friends, of gender and migration background (Brändle & Häuberer, Citation2015).
3. That is, the terms ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ are used in a relational manner regarding access to Higher Education. Thus, student’s poor in social capital might still be rich in relation to other dimensions.