Educational choices of Polish youth in an intergenerational perspective

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the parental role in educational decisions of young adults in Poland. The country-context is vital due to the profound impact of the 1989 transition on educational aspirations and subsequent ‘degree boom’ in the younger cohorts. Using data from two qualitative studies, we adopt an intergenerational lens to examine how young men and women are affected by their mothers and fathers when making choices about their educational pathways. We propose a matrix of four types of educational aspirations framed by parents, pointing to the importance of resources (capitals/socialisational conditions) on the one hand, and the notion of socialisation influences linked to pragmatism and experimentation, on the other. Based on the analysis we discuss four ideal-types of Successors, Questers, Trailblazers and Hustlers. Accounting also for the gender dimension, we contribute to the broader debates on the reproduction of inequalities and unpack ‘critical moments’ in youth transitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Transitions
• higher education
• aspirations
• generations
• Poland
• socialisation
• youth

Introduction

Three decades after the Polish 1989 transformation, it is now possible to observe – across various domains – intergenerational changes that unfolded from what was deemed an ‘uncertain transition’ (Burawoy and Verdery 1999) to democracy and neoliberal economy. One of the arenas particularly marked by radical shifts is that of accessibility and affordability of university degrees. Social change, together with socialisation (Arnett 1995; Handel 2006), determine educational aspirations transferred by parents to the young adults’ generation in Poland (Szymański and Walasek 1997; Kwiek 2013; Szafraniec 2017; Sadura 2018). In this article, we examine the impact of parents as socialisation agents in the changing educational context of Poland. We also draw attention to how educational aspirations and choices are intergenerationally framed, narrated and negotiated in families which have different levels of resources/capitals related to social class positioning (see, e.g., Thomson et al. 2002; Hanley 2017; Sadura 2018).

The 1989 transformation serves as a lens for observing reproduction of social inequalities. We argue that two modes of parental socialisation crisscross with resources to form four ideal-types of educational aspirations and choices in an intergenerational family setting. By drawing on two datasets from qualitative in-depth interviews with young adults, we present narratives about ‘critical moments’ (Thomson et al. 2002), signifying decision-making around schooling. Rich narratives of interviewees shed light on how parents manifested either pragmatic or open-ended approaches to educational pathways, through both verbal and nonverbal transmission. We also pay attention to gender when showing how mothers and fathers from different social classes encourage or discourage certain paths for their daughters and sons.

Social and educational setting of intergenerational transmission in Poland

Contributing to one of the key debates within educational sociology, this paper engages with the junction of parental aspirations and educational choices as corollary to social mobility and intergenerational transmission (Collins 1979; Roksa and Potter 2011), doing so in the less often examined context of Central and Eastern Europe, specifically Poland (see e.g., Sojkin, Bartkowiak, and Skuza 2012). On the one hand, ample research suggests a growing stagnation of upward social mobility and the conflation of being born privileged and remaining privileged in the Western hemisphere (e.g., Thomson et al. 2002; Skelton 2010; Lareau 2011; Ule, Živoder, and Du Bois-Reymond 2015; Major and Machin 2018). On the other hand, Polish transition initialised an extreme transformation of aspirations. While it was first believed that it could lead to greater equality in educational opportunities, it is now argued to have had an opposite effect (Kwiek 2013; Sadura 2018).

Specifically, the percentage of Poles with higher education increased fourfold between 1970 and 2010, with the biggest changes in education occurring after 1990. While just 3% of the population had university diplomas in 1970, today more than 40% of Polish people aged 25–34 have acquired degrees (Eurostat 2019). Kwiek (2017, 41) argues that the shift from elite to mass university education was ‘sudden and uncoordinated’, with scolarisation rates and availability growing in the span of 1.5 decades, faster than anywhere in Western Europe. In parallel, the educational gap between women and men has deepened from 1.2% in 1988 to 20% in 2019. In 1988, the 9% of university graduates already included more women (9.5% to 8.3.%) but the discrepancy only swelled throughout the next decades: 54% women and just 34% men account for the national average today (CBOS Public Opinion Research Center 2019). Crucially, while over 400 schools offer degrees in Poland, only two dozen are actual universities. School rankings are topped by the oldest and public (state) universities where the applicants with best A-level grades can study for free. While the system is now imploding, in 2000 over 62% of students had to pay tuition. The private higher education sector remains highly diverse: although prestige of several institutions is recognised, many are not seen as legitimate or standards-compliant (Kwiek 2017).

While issues of stagnant mobility and class inequality are a broad backdrop, a narrower theoretical framing of this paper lies in a renewed interest in socialisation (e.g., Abrantes 2013), especially as it relates to socialisation agents and impacts. Socialisation is the process of the continuous and never-ending learning, adopting and modifying norms within groups and society. Even though individuals experience socialisation as a lifelong process, its most vital stages occur in early life (e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966). This is connected to the study of ‘critical moments’ (Thomson et al. 2002) which determine how transitions unfold in individual biographies in a given society and time (Neale 2018).

During ‘critical moments’, family of origin is a key socialisation institution, operating alongside school, peers, religious/legal system, media or/and local community. Parents act as vital socialisation agents (Handel 2006) with direct and indirect (verbalised/nonverbal) normative input, as well as by forging webs of opportunities and constraints in terms of resources that can be mobilised or capitalised on. In that sense, socialisation is connected to the notions of intergenerationally transmitted capital, especially as the widened notion of cultural capital includes parenting practices (Lee et al. 2014) and constitutes a determinant for the reproduction of social class inequalities (see also Bourdieu 1973; Roksa and Potter 2011; Lareau 2011; O’Connor 2014). Thus, educational choices and aspirations can be observed in connection to conveyance of parental advantages onto children through socialisation and intergenerational transmission.

Socialisation of Polish youngsters born from mid-1980s to mid-1990s is an emanation of political contexts in which their parents found themselves on the eve of the 1989 transition (see e.g., Szymański and Walasek 1997; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Kwiek 2013; Sadura 2018). Following the fall of the Iron Curtain, previous patterns of intergenerational transmission were no longer applicable, yet the new ones have not been fully formed or readily available to the Polish parents. The pace of societal shifts caused clefts in the divergent and competing normative orders, resulting in what Szafraniec (2017) deems a symbolic chaos. Therefore, intergenerational transmission happened when norms were blurred or obscured, with no stable reference points at hand (ibid., see also Szymański & Walasek 1997; Sadura 2018). From the perspective of capitals, CEE region experienced a pathway to a capitalist development that skipped over the stage of resource accumulation (Szafraniec 2017, 74) and the families moved from the conditioning of constant shortages pre-1989, to ‘resource galore’ in 1990s. As such, they rarely learnt about amassing resources under the ethos of hard work and delayed gratification (ibid.).

The above processes of the 1990s typify the changing meaning of education, which shifted from idealism to marketisation, with emphasis placed on the newly defined ‘success’ on the neoliberal labour market (see also Ule, Živoder, and Du Bois-Reymond 2015). However, this socialisational transmission was put together haphazardly with school failing to accommodate acceleration. As a counterpoint, the family remained a traditional hearth of safety and stability, with the normative model continuously encompassing a married Catholic couple with children (Slany 2002). During the last two decades of the 20th century, Polish women had more children (total fertility rates stood at 2.28 in 1980 and 1.99 in 1990, respectively) and became mothers at an early age of 25 (Statistics Poland 2018). As argued by Slany (2002), alternative family models – including getting a divorce – were socially frowned upon, particularly outside larger cities. Conversely, patriarchal family values resulted in strong beliefs about discrepant roles of men (breadwinners) and women (carers), despite factual commonality of dual-career households since the inception of state socialism.

Beyond the axis of divisions along the rural/urban and regionally prosperous versus plummeting economic lines, the resources available to young Poles clearly have to do with the social positioning of their parents. As in Western Europe and the US (e.g., Collins 1979; Thomson et al. 2002; Lareau 2011; Major and Machin 2018), the educational divide arose from either limited or extensive parental capitals and resources, which in turn elucidated reproduction of either middle- or working-class aspirations. However, the inner-stratification makes distinctions between social classes harder to operationalise (Savage 2015; Major and Machin 2018; Domański 2000; Sadura 2018). Middle-class today envelops routinely prestigious upper-middle-class (e.g., lawyers, physicians), economically struggling but culturally established category of public sector employees (teachers, city bureaucrats), as well as emergent but substantial class of those working in the service sector. In Poland, this is further complicated by those who became affluent through business ventures in the 1990s, as they have excessive financial means without necessarily possessing cultural capital to match them (Domański 2000; Sadura 2018). Working-class encompasses those typically ‘left behind’ – economically, educationally or culturally – by the transformation processes (ibid). Along these lines, the systemic expansion and then friction (Kwiek 2013, 2017) in the intergenerational transmission and socialisation modes can be observed among young adults born in the 1980s and 1990s in Poland.

Growing up, youth from the families of governmental officials, intellectuals and managers could benefit not only from the large-scale investments that their parents were ready to make to ensure their futures (see also Major and Machin 2018), but also – in a less tangible aspect – had access to information about the changing workforce (Szafraniec 2017, 87). Middle-class and elite Poles internalised high self-worth, demonstrating what Arnett (1995) considers a ‘broad’ type of socialisation, which moulds individualist attitudes and freedoms. In yet another adoption of a Western model (Lareau 2011; Lee et al. 2014), Polish middle-class parents subscribed to child-centric parenting and ‘concerted cultivation’, treating children as ‘projects’ for realising their own aspirations (Ule, Živoder, and Du Bois-Reymond 2015). Broad socialisation takes away the baggage of following a straightforward, linear path from adolescence to adulthood, lifting traditional social expectations and allowing experimentation in forging one’s path (Arnett ibid.). Children of the economically privileged parents were said to undergo the ‘escape forward’ (Zahorska 2007; Szafraniec 2017; Sadura 2018) through internationalised education (Cairns 2014; Pustulka et al. 2019), especially when both parents had university degree (see e.g., Opheim 2007).

The more traditional middle-classes, especially degree-educated parents working in the public sector, inscribed aspirations for upward social mobility in their children (see also Szymański and Walasek 1997) but often lacked information to critically and realistically assess the future of jobs (Szafraniec 2017, 87). These parents motivated children to be studious and hardworking, albeit this advice was not universally translating to easy entrance to the labour market marked by professionalisation. Further, the general premise of cultural diffusion made the working-class believe that a university degree can be a solution to all employment-related ills (Sadura 2018). Therefore, having a university degree quickly became a norm (Szafraniec 2017) not only for the elite or middle-class but for all parents, as long as they were able to afford it.

Working-class parents tend to feel uncomfortable as educational advisors, but ‘try’ for the sake of their children if they have experienced some sort of social advancement, e.g., as exceptions in their family histories of school achievement (see also Freeman 2010; Hanley 2017). Competing theories have to be noted for children of farmers, skilled labourers, as well as those with unemployed parents who expectedly encounter greatest barriers to education and subsequent employment in Poland (Sadura 2018). Sadura (2018) contends that deprived families could compensate for economic lacks with emotional support, which is known as paramount for young people’s educational ambition, with these parents going through an educational field together with their children (Freeman 2010). As a consequence of such capital conversions, Polish young corporate workforce and intelligentsia has a working-class pedigree (Sadura 2018).

Research also shows that the norms of the young Poles are an amalgam of lifestyles and cultural cues: those imported from the West operating alongside traditional, conventional and local visions (Szafraniec 2017, 92). The observed modes of socialisation in Poland reveal the presence of both its broad type directed at individualisation, and a narrow vision associated with conformism and solidarity (see Arnett 1995). Moreover, as biographic strategies are altered over time, various types of socialisation, including also hybrid models, can occur in one family (Sarnowska 2019). Young people additionally function between the two competing ideas of compensating for tough times of shortages often recollected by parents (Inglehart 1990) and a surrounding, postmaterialist world-vision (Sojkin, Bartkowiak, and Skuza 2012). Independently of the character of values and attitudes framed as key for a successful life, education remains a conspicuous aspiration (Szafraniec 2017) and is being realised in various ways across divergent social milieus. All in all, young Poles – as their Western counterparts – experience individualisation of risk (Beck 2008; O’Connor 2014), which means that they must face the consequences of their choices alone. The abundance of options, makes decision-making harder and results in the fields of socialisation, its agents and intergenerational transfers being more complex to unravel (Szafraniec 2017).

Beyond the above, the gender dimension transpires in that women are still more inclined to consider family opinion in their education, while men appear more pragmatic (Sojkin, Bartkowiak, and Skuza 2012; Skelton 2010), echoing idealism and postmaterialist orientations (Inglehart 1990). It is also worth noting that mothers are usually identified as greater catalysts for their offspring’s upward journeys (see, e.g., Bowman and Howard 1985). Major inequalities, however, can be attributed to social class and the quality of education. Kwiek (2013) argues that the educational expansion and boom of the 1990s and 2000s did little to prevent social polarisation and systemic contraction. He demonstrates that university diplomas are self-perpetuating attributes of intergenerational transmission of class in Poland and ‘having parents who attained higher education makes one’s own probability of attaining higher education ten times higher than it would otherwise be’ (Kwiek 2013, 564).

Here we focus specifically on how young people narrate the role of their parents. Research in this regard has been inconclusive, largely because intergenerational changes coincide with the speedy pace of social change in Poland. Some claim that parental influence is decreasing (Szafraniec 2017), while others point to the sustained prime position of parents as significant others whose approval young adults crave the most (CBOS Public Opinion Research Center 2019). There is an ongoing discussion about the meaning of educational opportunities that the parents engender due to their origin, capital and resources (Sadura 2018). Although ‘higher education is being “inherited” all over Europe, in Poland this ratio is on average almost two times higher than in other European countries’ (Kwiek 2013, 564). A delayed higher education gain is accompanied by a profound erosion and devaluation of diplomas and credentials, especially those gained at non-prestigious/peripherally located schools (Zahorska 2007).

Data & methods

This paper is based on the empirical material from two research projects, both tackling the topic of transitions to adulthood in contemporary Poland. The studies are linked through methodological frames of Qualitative Longitudinal Research (Neale 2018) and reliance on individual in-depth interviews (IDIs). Both projects used a mixture of convenience and purposive sampling. The first study (S1) is a large-scale project titled Education-to-domestic and- foreign labour market transitions of youth: The role of local community, peer group and new media and centred on how the young generation transitions from education to foreign and domestic labour markets, with the explicit emphasis on the role of parents within these processes. The data for S1 was collected over three waves of interviews between 2016 and 2019. For this paper, a subsample of n = 83 respondents with higher education (total of 129 interviews from two waves) was drawn. The second research project (S2), Transitions to motherhood across three generations of Poles. An intergenerational longitudinal study (GEMTRA) has been underway since 2018 and tackles transitions to parenthood in an intergenerational perspective. Although this dataset is less explicitly focused on educational choices, the collected accounts shed light on the role of parents in young women’s trajectories. Data from IDIs with 28 university-educated women was reanalysed.

In terms of socio-demographic characteristics of the combined dataset, which entails a total of 111 interviewees, it should be stated that the interviewees were born between 1978 and 1998. The majority of respondents come from small and medium-sized towns, often in the more peripheral parts of Poland. Both research designs were approved by the Research Ethics Committees. Prior to the interview, participants were provided with information about the study (anonymity, right to withdraw, data use), had an opportunity to ask questions about the projects and were then asked to sign a consent form.

The interviews were conducted exclusively face-to-face in S2 and either face-to-face or via Skype in S1, particularly to accommodate internationally mobile respondents. Primarily peer-researchers, i.e., young adults representing the same generation as research participants conducted the IDIs. Audio-recorded material was transcribed verbatim and a cross-sectional thematic coding was subsequently applied. While each individual was treated as a unit of analysis, four ideal-types are proposed in connection with two dimensions. It should be noted, however, that we base the typology on the narrative evaluation of past events, as the interviewed young adults were probed about past educational choices.

Parental role in educational choices: a typology

The first criterion in the typology pertains to the scope of resources available to a young individual who makes educational choices, concurrent to previous research (Thomson et al. 2003; Lareau 2011). By resources we mean all types of capital – social, economic, cultural, as well as information a person can access in their home setting. These are aggregated to form the dimension of ‘socialisation conditions’ seen as either resource-rich or resource-limited. The second axis encompasses ‘socialisation modes’ that stem from broader, parental life-orientations directly linked to either narrow or broad socialisation (Arnett 1995). In connection to Inglehart (1990), we see two foci on either experimentation (creating one’s path) or on pragmatism (taking the established route). Based on these domains, we propose four pathways to making educational choices in the context of parental impact as socialisation agents (see Figure 1). What ensues are portraits of Questers, Successors. Trailblazers and Hustlers.

Figure 1. Aspirational types in relation to socialisation conditions (resources) and socialisation modes (experimentation/pragmatism)

The well-off Polish Questers

The first type of aspirations was found in wealthy families inclined to see their children’s educational pathways through a steady and broad investment into development (Arnett 1995; see also Lee et al. 2014):

My mum was the one who cared the most about (my education … .). She was always sending me places, signing me up for extracurricular activities. She cared about me being able to try out as many different things as possible, for example, through art classes, sports. (S1, Maria)

For young adults whose parents have extensive resources varying from financial means, to a wealth of cultural capital (university education), there is a certain ‘obviousness’ to becoming a university graduate (see also Kwiek 2013; Sadura 2018). The parents might not ever need to speak about this expectation, but the plan is there, in the unspoken intergenerational transmission:

It was unimaginable for me not to study. Every person in my family has been university-educated. I was a black sheep with the humanities, as my entire family graduated from the University of Technology. I also was somehow aware that my parents met at the University, (…). There was never any plan that did not include studying and it also had to be in Warsaw (where) my parents and sister studied (…). There was the idea of studying abroad, which I did through the Erasmus programme. My dad really pushed me to try myself abroad to have better perspectives. This has not happened fully but maybe it will (…) I’m not excluding this option. (S1, Kajtek)

The Questers are those who are ‘caught up’ to the Western aspirations expressed through parenting practices (Lee et al. 2014) parallel to Poland’s ‘back to Europe’ trek in the 1990s. The discussed Polish father wants his child to be part of the global generation (Beck 2008) and inspires open-ended plans. Supporting children’s educational exploration might be a form of vicariously compensating for the fact that the parents could not follow their dreams under the communist rule. Therefore, these parents endorse values of extended emerging adulthood (Arnett 1995) independently of the child’s gender and sponsor multi-directional explorations of educational choices within prolonged transitions:

My parents always encouraged me to do everything that I could possibly think of. I was engaging a lot in multiple [projects] – educational or travel-related. I was learning foreign languages. It was about discovering the world. I had my parents’ support (S2, Aurelia)

Questers often adhere to the same patterns of exploration that can be seen in Western Europe/the US (Cairns 2014). This makes them stand out from their Polish peers as direct beneficiaries of international education through diploma and credit mobility (Pustulka et al. 2019):

My parents (…) always supported me in all my decisions, those more and less stupid ones (…) I travelled a lot, I studied Eastern languages at the uni, so I could take advantage of numerous exchange programmes (…) I was abroad almost all the time (S2, Kaja)

Aware of uncertainty, the parents embrace broad socialisation (Arnett 1995) as the best countermeasure for the elusiveness of success in the modern world. Thanks to the breadth of resources at their disposal, they can offer unconditional support to their children’s quests. Even if they do not fully embrace continuous mobility, the parents demonstrate accommodating attitudes towards worldly professional pursuits:

They did not understand (my constant moving all over the world) but they were happy that I was happy (…). My dad had a stable job all his life and perhaps he’d like me to have one as well, though he knows this is not something I desire. (…) However, my mum is not worried but rather (encouraging, telling me) ‘to just fly and do (things)’ My mum was actually quite unhappy when I came back to Poland. (S1, Daniela)

Among Questers, gender influences the intergenerational transfer in the parents’ generation in a particular way. From the above excerpt, the mother emerges as the primary socialisation agent with the prominent idea about a young generation of girls being at liberty to explore life chances beyond the traditional horizons. Through high-quality university education, the daughters of Questers are at the forefront of a feminist revolution that was unattainable to their mothers (see also Skelton 2010; Sojkin, Bartkowiak, and Skuza 2012).

The parents told me to go, try things out, (…) there was also never any forcing me that I was supposed to go for [this course] or this particular university. I had a full scope of choices. I also went to informational meetings, open doors’ days, I was finding stuff out and my parents have not pushed me in any way. (S2, Alina)

Rather than emphasising a single ‘critical moment’, the Questers have parents who are willing to handle false-starts and biographic shifts, supporting their offspring economically over the extended transitional periods. The openness of successful business owners, intellectuals and artist-parents engenders a progressive outlook and makes parental advice unspecific, yet in line with valuing global aspirations. The latter comes from accepting pervasive uncertainty and ever-evolving labour market opportunities.

Lines of succession

The next type of Successors also concerns families with extensive resources, yet showcases intergenerational transmission wherein parents have pragmatic and inflexible approaches to their children’s educational pathways. While they are similar to Questers’ parents in requiring their offspring to aim high, the Successor parents are vocal in fostering highly specific choices they see as safeguards of the envisioned futures:

My choice of high school was not something that my (parents) approved of. (…) I was not self-confident about getting into one of the best schools (… .) and remember the day when I got the results of my end-of-middle-school exam and it turned out I got top marks, over 90%. From that moment, my parents started to really push and told me to change my selection (…). They have driven me around town to change my choices (…) and I was admitted to a school that my mother wanted for me. (S2, Nadia)

More broadly, as the moniker suggests, the parents in this ideal-type seem to understand that accumulation of family capital was not the most viable family strategy in the past (Szafraniec 2017). In the new reality, they wish their family’s social standing to be shielded and ideally improved over generations. Even though they already possess significant resources, they believe their children should be their successors in prestigious careers. An excerpt below demonstrates how a family creates a lineage of physicians and lawyers:

My plan was always to become a judge. I considered medicine for a while as well. This is because everyone on my dad’s side (is a doctor and my sister) is a dentist. Everyone has a medical degree. I thought about it, I was mapping my interests between biology (…) and humanities, noticing that there were more items in the latter (…) Therefore, I decided to go in this direction and that made it clear that I would study law. It was not a difficult choice (…) My mum supported me and my dad wanted me to be a physician but – when I said I did not want that – I was supposed to become a lawyer and sue doctors instead. It was a great plan. (S2, Amelia)

There is an evident degree of pragmatism in how Successors should become ‘extensions’ of their parents (see Ule, Živoder, and Du Bois-Reymond 2015), thus intergenerational transmission pivots to establishing genealogical lineage, especially when resources pose no constraints as a result of the parents’ professional achievement:

My parents were generally quite supportive of me choosing sociology (at university). They are both psychologists, so they saw my decision as following in their footsteps. I remember getting a sociology textbook for Christmas (S2, Marianna).

For many Successors, a temporal dimension of the parents’ shifting in their views could be observed. Specifically, this concerned allowing their children to explore atypical paths through adolescence, but ending exploration and ‘facing reality’ towards the last year of high school. What is crucial here is that children brought up with a lot of resources could easily change their mind and receive tremendous support from their parents at those ‘critical moments’ (Thomson et al. 2003). This was illustrated in the story of Daria (S1) who initially wanted to be a journalist and went to a high-school with a corresponding profile. However, she started doubting the practicality of this choice and her parents – both physicians – had done everything they could to steer her back onto a safer and more respectable choice. First, they paid for extra tutoring in biology and chemistry. Second, when Daria did not manage to get into a free degree programme, they paid tuition for private medical school. Throughout her long university education, they also organised internships for her through their medical network (social capital) and co-financed her work and travel trips, for instance to Tanzania and Alaska.

Successors must not necessarily have great relationships with their parents, yet this does not preclude recognising the pragmatic value of capitalising on the resources that can facilitate professional success. Marcjanna (S2) had a feeling of being excessively protected and pushed into an elitist educational setting:

I have always been a very good student because my parents wrapped me in cotton wool (…). From early childhood I had extracurricular activities – ballet and piano lessons. I was forbidden from playing with children from the neighbourhood (…) who (my parents) viewed as delinquent. I rebelled but my mum still extra tutored me at home after school. (S2, Marcjanna)

This relates to the pressures that typify the child-centric practices of the middle-classes (Lee et al. 2014). However, despite initial contestation, Marcjanna is now a de facto successor to her father. She chose technical profile in high school and studied engineering, so that her path became fully aligned with her family’s social and economic capitals. She is taking over a family business, even though it was not a pathway traditionally ascribed to a daughter (see also Sojkin, Bartkowiak, and Skuza 2012). Thus, gender seems to become unimportant because the Successors’ parents typically have only a few children and some of them resist the prescribed way of life. While the parental couples among Successors seem more traditional that among Questers, daughters nevertheless belong to the generational chain.

Socialisation conditions secured by the parents of Successors could enable a variety of educational quests, yet the socialisational influences hone in on a narrow scope of choices. This is why rebellious periods in Successors’ trajectories are not appreciated by their parents:

There was never any problem with my going to university (and) sending me for an exchange to Belgium was certainly a cost that my parents incurred (…). (When I chose a degree in African studies), my father did not react well because he is a very practical person, with both feet firmly on the ground. He had a lot of doubts (…) It started to dawn on me when studying was over and I had to find a job (that he might have been right). My parents much preferred my upper degree choice: international relations. (S1, Kajtek)

While all parents wish their offspring to do well, the parents of Successors recommend paths of least resistance to ensure success conducive to accumulating family capital.

Trailblazers making it against the odds

Trailblazers have parents who belong to lower social classes and had limited resources at home. Affected by hardship, their parents were keen on securing a better life for their children through education, so Trailblazers are usually the first ones in their family to go to college:

My mother and grandmother played no role whatsoever in my educational choices (…) Neither of them was educated while for me getting a degree was obvious (…) because I had this desire to have a different life. (S2, Barbara)

While the homes of Trailblazers might not have been conducive to the mobilisation of capital, the focus on experimentation was often inscribed in the negation of home setting and explicit aspiration to a middle-class or otherwise different lifestyle. In line with what Hanley (2017) discussed in the UK context, the Trailblazers exemplified here by Barbara were searching for ways to become ‘respectable’:

I wonder about the role of my friend who was from an artistic home of a professor, which seemed absolutely idyllic and wonderful to me (…). Not that my house was a nightmare (…), it was neat and everything, but (theirs) was a wealthy household, aesthetically well above the standards of Polish homes at the time. (…) I would say that it was about aspirations and opened my eyes (S2, Barbara)

An unexpected ‘critical moment’ (Thomson et al. 2002) shaped the path of the interviewee who saw herself as ‘other’, not belonging due to aspirations (see Hanley 2017). However, the parents of Trailblazers tended to accept their children’s educational choices and welcomed upward social mobility. Moreover, they did so without imposing anything: education was perceived as a guarantee of escaping dirty manual labour, unfavourable economic conditions and limited opportunities in the local labour market (Zahorska 2007).

While the parents of Trailblazers strongly believed that a university degree opens doors to professional success, their lack of pragmatism and absence of precise formulation of aspirations could sometimes be hard for the children. An interviewee reflected that she was planning to study engineering but then, in the final year of high-school, made a last-minute random decision about going for a degree in humanities. Today she believes this could have been a mistake but can be explained by the lack of directionality in her parental home:

There was this narrative that generally it doesn’t matter what one studies. Things were supposed to be good regardless, as long as you finished university. Otherwise, you’d be digging ditches on the side of the road. I was neither constrained in any way nor received hints on what one should do in life. I had no clue in high school. (S2, Julia)

The parents’ perceptions were based on success understood as achievable through hard work as a prerequisite for good jobs back in the 1990s (Szymański and Walasek 1997). Thus, the parents of Trailblazers wanted their children to study diligently, yet neither mothers nor fathers had access to viable information about specifics. Instead, they presented a shared front when tertiary education’s availability (Zahorska 2007; Kwiek 2017) reinforced stereotypes connected to skilled labour, inadvertently promoting broad socialisation (see Arnett 1995). Unable to recognise what to study, female and male Trailblazers were at a loss regarding educational decisions. At such times, they might have received substitutional attention from school teachers, mentors or relatives. In case of limited economic and cultural capital, significant alternative socialisation agents mattered:

I have a sense of never being sufficiently cared for as a child. (…) I wanted more than my parents were able to give me. (…) When it came to educational plans, it was terrible. I was not interested in anything and had (…) lots of ideas which were not realised because of money (…) Then there was this friend of the family (…) who sent me to speak with a career advisor (…). Soon thereafter, I went to a preparatory course and here I have to say that my parents really stepped up (…), went out of their way to find books in antique stores, so I could prepare and get into university (…) to study art history. (S2, Barbara)

It can be seen that Trailblazers had profound difficulty in identifying their strengths. Not wanting to disappoint their parents, they quickly internalised the risks (Beck 2008) associated with failure and learned to be self-reliant as adults. In addition, stories show that the parents have few qualms about the practicality of their children’s choices, being unopposed to experimentation consistent with broad socialisation modes (Arnett 1995):

(My mother) urged me to go to university but no one told me what to study. They rather said I had to decide for myself, that it was my choice (…) and my responsibility. My brother and I become independent quite quickly because we always had to do everything ourselves. (S2, Hania)

A ‘go-getter’ approach is the key trait of Trailblazers who have to ‘make do’ in the face of limited resources at home (see also Hanley 2017). Wanting to prevent downward mobility, the parents of Trailblazers were the only ones who did not oppose mobility during high-school, allowing children to flee the nest quite early:

I got into (one of the top) high schools in Warsaw. I was 16 and had to take care of things myself, I lived with my older brother who was already at university (…). Being away from parents shapes a person, one grows up very fast (S2, Martyna).

From the perspective of parents, especially those who migrated from the countryside to the cities during state socialism, the 1990s often brought some kind of upward social mobility, so Trailblazers share some similarity with Questors in completing the pathway to social advancement started by their parents. When going through educational stages, Trailblazers drew on emotional parental capital (Sadura 2018), which was not a salient push at ‘critical moments’ (Thomson et al. 2002) but rather comprehensive care over time:

My parents told me that they would support me no matter what I choose, the most important thing was to be happy. They enjoyed every success I had in the field of history. Even when I stopped believing that it made sense, they still believed. (S1, Kazik)

While Trailblazers were often describing frustration with their families of origin in terms of limited financial or social resources, their success was reliant on the conversion of emotional capital (Sadura 2018) and the shared family desire of becoming ‘respectable’ (Hanley 2017) in the face of adversity. In the Polish context, the socialisational patchwork and experimentation paid off, as Trailblazers amassed skills and competencies consistent with the dynamics of the laborforce absorbing university-educated employees into transnational service sector (Sadura 2018).

Hustlers at work

The fourth and final type of Hustlers describes people who come from working-class families and have parents with pragmatic orientations. On the one hand, this would mean simple reproduction of class, on the other, it is complicated by the educational boom and the resulting parental aspirations. The parents of Hustlers often advise their children on the grounds of post-transformation neoliberal ideology of ‘making it’ by repeating the biographies of success they saw around them or in the media in the 1990s. Therefore, the parents push their children – especially sons – towards technical skills, even if that did not match with the interests voiced by their offspring:

- How did you end up in the technical school? - Unfortunately, that’s what my parents wanted. I am not entirely happy with it because they pushed me to do it. Today I would probably be a chef otherwise, because that’s what I always wanted to be (…). (Parents believed that) with a technical qualification, one can always get work (…) (S1, Olek).

A pragmatic socialisational mode was an outcome of limited information about the labour market and no resources that could help change that. When conceiving of upward social mobility in their families, the intergenerational transmission often related to mothers recognising teacher professions as ‘respectable’ (see also Bowman and Howard 1985):

(Going for this university course) was suggested by my mum (in the vein of) ‘you’ll go, you’ll be a computer science teacher’. They had their imagination but this didn’t pan out. (S1, Sebastian)

Sebastian’s story demonstrates how Hustlers struggle with maternal pragmatism pushing them in the direction they do not feel comfortable with, which is exacerbated by the fact that they have to concurrently secure funds when combining full-time work with studies. For that reason, they are in paid, extramural university programmes (see Kwiek 2017), commuting to school on the weekends while working in low-skilled positions during the week to afford it. This creates a vicious cycle of personal confusion and familial pressures, for instance as Sebastian dropped out and restarted university three times on the basis of an ultimately flawed parental advice:

My mother persuaded me to go for it (…) Theoretically it was supposed to be IT and technology but it was much more about home economics (…). I didn’t want to do it (…). I still don’t know what I want to do with my life now. It’s probably the simplest answer: I didn’t know then and I still don’t know. (S1, Sebastian)

Pursuing higher education chosen by parents brings little benefit to Hustlers who end up getting university degrees that make little to no difference to their economic standing. Although Sebastian eventually managed to graduate with a BA in social work, he continues being a furniture salesman. Again, this is because Hustlers tend to receive education of a subpar quality, offered at provincial universities and enabled by marketisation clashing with people’s sudden high educational aspirations post-1989 (Kwiek 2013, 2017).

Further, gender division is a crucial factor in terms of parental socialisation in families with weaker cultural and economic capital. Young women received different messages than their brothers in terms of intergenerational transmission:

(My mother) clearly had educational plans for me but she has abandoned a strong articulation of expectations and imposing plans (…) because she (failed with my brother). She forced him, (…) he agreed but then dropped out. (She) didn’t want to repeat this mistake, so she let me choose freely, emphasising I just needed to finish because no one in my family graduated from university. (S2 Ania)

Ania’s story illuminates two findings. First, it affirms the working-class parents’ propensity for having more specific and not necessarily degree-oriented plans for sons, while encouraging daughters to pursue academics (Skelton 2010). Secondly, this case demonstrates the dynamic nature of our ideal-types since Ania’s mother made a ‘correction’ to pragmaticism vs. open-endedness of educational aspirations. In families where higher education is not ‘inherited’, older siblings can be a ‘guinea pig’ of sorts as the parents adjust their strategizing after ill-advising their firstborn. Moreover, the parents may discontinue their engagement in the educational pathways of Hustlers if they do not understand them. This is exemplified by Tadek (S1) who always wanted to be a musician, yet his parents pushed him towards a technical school:

I was very rebellious, lots of truancy (…). I exclusively went to music classes (in the afternoons) (…). It ended with me dropping out two years early and passing A-levels through an evening programme (S1, Tadek)

The parents had a clear vision of a ‘normal’ education and, with their pragmatism, disregarded musical talent as a possible backbone of a professional career:

They no longer want to get involved. I already messed up so much (in their view) that I bet they don’t want to help me. (S1, Tadek)

Faced with his parents’ disappointment, Tadek then needed to hustle and forged a path to becoming ‘respectable’ (Hanley 2017) on his own terms, ultimately earning a BA in his chosen field of music at a top university. It has to be noted that Hustlers are least represented in our sample, which is skewed towards degree holders and women. This may indicate that pragmatic socialisation in lower social classes results in technical and vocational education rather than university paths. In that sense, our qualitative research compliments statistical evidence on reproduction of educational inequalities in Poland (Kwiek 2013) by portraying outliers.

Discussion & conclusions

The generation of the current thirty-year-olds serves as a link between the past social order of pretransition Poland and its European presence and future (Szafraniec 2017). Therefore, examining aspirations lets us unpack education-related social change in the countries previously hidden behind the Iron Curtain (see also Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Kwiek 2013; Sadura 2018). In this paper, we answer the question about the impact of parents as socialisation agents in Poland, with the changing context viewed as a backdrop for intergenerational transmission.

Our typology, which criss-crosses the dimension of socialisational conditions (resources) with socialisation modes, illustrates the discrepancies between young adults talking about parental influences during their journeys to higher education. We argue that Successors and Questors profit from a sense of security guaranteed by their parents’ resources. With abundant social, economic and cultural capital at home, they benefit profoundly from the reproduction of social and educational inequalities in Poland (Domański 2000; Kwiek 2013; Sadura 2018). However, we supplicate that intergenerational impact is much greater for the Successors type, as the interviewees spoke about salient and specific parental aspirations. Young adults were expected to follow parents as ‘gate-keepers’, under the logic of careers that contribute to succession and accumulation of capital in kinship structures (Ule, Živoder, and Du Bois-Reymond 2015). Next, we argue that parents have average impact on the educational aspirations of Questers and Trailblazers. For the former, the vastness of resources is offset by broad socialisation (Arnett 1995), meaning that Quester-children are expected to make postmaterialist choices (Inglehart 1990). This posits them as members of exploration-driven ‘global generation’ (Beck 2008; Pustulka et al. 2019) whose parents operate as silent advisers and supporters of prolonged transitions through financial means. Rendering Arnett’s broad socialisation concept (1995) empirically applicable, Questers receive many incentives to build self-esteem and self-confidence.

Generally speaking, socialisational influence of working-class parents is weaker than in middle-classes due to limited resources (Sadura 2018; Savage 2015; Hanley 2017). While Successors and Questers are children of the clear ‘economic winners’ of the 1989 transformation who efficiently converted social and cultural resources into economic capital (Szafraniec 2017), Trailblazers and Hustlers grew up with a degree of uncertainty (see Buroway & Verdery, 1999). We have shown that the reasons behind them not reproducing their parents’ educational trajectories and pursuing university degrees are two-fold. From a structural perspective, they are linked to the educational boom that made university degrees highly desirable and accessible for the Polish young generation (CBOS Public Opinion Research Center 2019; Szafraniec 2017). Since Trailblazers share socialisational mode with Questers, their frustration is forestalled by the broad views on exploration and inclusion of alternative socialisation agents (Handel 2006), paired with successful conversion of emotional capital (Sadura 2018). Conversely, Hustlers going to university are least influenced by parents because what is viewed as rational is very different for the representatives of two generations in the family. In essence, the parents of Hustlers rarely see non-technical education as fitting in with their pragmatism. This is exacerbated by Hustlers obtaining higher education in less renowned schools, thus seeing it as having no effect on their labour market positioning. A post-1989 intergenerational rift (see also Szafraniec 2017) leads to young adults feeling lost in education-to-work transitions.

Besides usability of the typology, our work underlines the gendered nature (Skelton 2010) of educational aspirations and outcomes in the Polish context where daughters are generally expected to aim higher and professionalise, standing at least on equal footing with young men through their much greater participation in tertiary education (Kwiek 2013, 2017). First, we see a difference in the approaches of mothers and fathers, with middle-class men more direct and pragmatic while women promote ‘romantic’ and open-ended plans in nuanced ways. Juxtaposing this with socialisation modes, maternal significant but unspecific impact is most notable among progressive Questers (especially daughters; see also Pustulka et al. 2019) and emotionally supported Trailblazers (sons and daughters). Fathers are at the helm of ‘traditional’ business-like Successor-families, yet – due to changing demographics and young women’s better education – they equally embrace daughters and sons as possible heirs. Furthermore, mothers are more active and vocal in educational paths of children from families with limited resources, wherein fathers are largely absent (see also Bowman and Howard 1985), especially in the narratives of Hustlers.

As for future work, we recognise limitations of qualitative research, albeit done on a relatively large scale, and plan on applying the typology to survey data on transitions-to-adulthood in Poland, so as to further strengthen reliability and validity of two socialisation-driven dimensions. In addition, elaborating on gender educational issues in an intergenerationally comparative perspective is one of the future directions of research we envision, with avenues concerning juxtaposition of parent and young adults’ narratives, parenting styles, rural/urban origins of families and closer examination of variability in parental aspirations for siblings. Additional work will be invested into unbundling the here analytically conflated forms of capital to see how each kind – emotional, educational, economic etc. – translates to specific outcomes per ideal-type.

In conclusion, our work contributes to revitalising socialisation (Abrantes 2013), underscoring how investigating socialisation modes and conditions enables a more nuanced understanding of educational aspirations in 21^st century Poland. We concur with the existing studies (e.g., Collins 1979; Thomson et al. 2003; Domański 2000; Lareau 2011; Savage 2015; Hanley 2017; Major and Machin 2018) and confirm the importance of social class/family capital and resources, which forge paramount crevices between Polish parents’ capacities. However, we see viability in going beyond the muddled waters of defining class under marketisation of higher education and erosion of diplomas (Zahorska 2007; Kwiek 2017). Therefore, we propose the axis of socialisation modes (Arnett 1995), which correspond to values (Inglehart 1990) and explain why – and to what effect – certain parents are more pragmatic while others seem rather open-minded when it comes to educational pathways of their offspring.

Conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Center Poland [Narodowe Centrum Nauki] under the Sonata Bis-5 and Sonata-13 schemes; grant numbers 2015/18/E/HS6/00147 and 2017/26/D/HS6/00605. Open access of this article was financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland under the 2019-2022 program “Regional Initiative of Excellence”, project number 012 / RID / 2018/19.

Notes on contributors

Justyna Sarnowska

Paula Pustulka is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Youth Research Center at the SWPS University. She is a sociologist researching youth/young adulthood, migration, gender and families. She specializes in qualitative longitudinal research (QLR).

Justyna Sarnowska works as an Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Youth Research Center at the SWPS University. Her research interests are educational and occupational aspirations of youth, education-to-work transition, entering adulthood, qualitative longitudinal research.