Educational aspirations and decisions in Barcelona, Spain and Bergen, Norway: the significance of class and class fractions

ABSTRACT

The article addresses the significance of class for educational aspirations and decisions among 2030 tenth graders in Barcelona, Spain and 2141 tenth graders in Bergen, Norway. By utilizing a class scheme that operationalizes horizontal as well as vertical class differences, I investigate the social stratification of aspirations to occupations requiring higher education and enrolment in tracks in upper secondary school. I find that vertical class differences are important for aspirations and enrolment, as well as for a misalignment between these, in both countries. Moreover, class fractions endowed with a preponderance of cultural capital seem to be more oriented towards higher education in Bergen, Norway, whereas fractions endowed with a preponderance of economic capital have equal or higher prospects of aspiring to occupations requiring higher education or taking academic tracks in Barcelona, Spain. This difference, I suggest, is linked to differences in education systems in the transition from school to work, as well as to differences in unemployment rates since the economic crisis in 2008. A misalignment between aspirations and enrolment is not as widespread as expected from previous literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Aspirations
• educational decisions
• class
• inequality

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Marina Elias and Rafael Merino for preparing and sharing data and variables from the Barcelona-sample. Without it this article would not be possible.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 www.iscy.org.

2 Habitus can be thought of as a set of master patterns, or embodied dispositions, including certain social and linguistic traits, manners, style and ‘know-how’ that is often perceived as a natural way of being.

3 Even though the systems in both countries are largely public, the private market has recently expanded in Spain; even though Spanish private schools are all publicly funded and relatively inexpensive, they are regarded as more prestigious (Bereményi and Carrasco 2017). In Norway, the private market is small at this level. Private schools at this level are religious or offereing alternative pedagogy, they are mostly publicly funded, financial dividends are illegal and school fees are strictly regulated by law.

4 In Barcelona, also other students born in 1998 were targeted, to include those that repeated grades. They will however not be part of this study if they did not start a track in upper secondary in 2015.

5 This question was formulated somewhat differently in the two countries. In Norway, the students were asked what they thought they would be doing at the age of 30, whereas in Spain they were asked what they would like to be doing when they were 30. In the literature, aspirations are defined as abstract statements about or hopes for what the future might bring; this does not necessarily reflect socioeconomic realities in the urgent future (Gottfredson 1981; Beal and Crocket 2010; Andres et al. 1999; Khatab 2015). This definition is arguably closer to the way the question was formulated in the Spanish survey. However, as the students were 16 years old when they were asked the question, it may be rather abstract in both cases, also when looking at the nature of the answers and the differences between the countries in terms of realism. Moreover, while the question demands the students to project them selves into the future, any class differences found can also be related to the students’ capacity to do this. As such, the variable should not be though to simply measure aspirations.

6 As the question was open-ended, some of the students replied with two different occupations. In Norway, a dominance approach was employed: if the student replied with two different occupations, the one requiring a higher level of education was chosen. For practical reasons, their first response was selected in Spain. Most students gave one answer, however, and the differences between the approaches are not considered problematic.

7 Suplementary analyses including these alternatives gave similar results. Available upon request.

8 There is a vast body of literature about immigrants, their children in Europe and educational aspirations and outcomes. This is not the focus of this article but results are available upon request. Similarly, gender is not the focus of the analysis but the results are available upon request.

9 I do not have data from before and after the crisis so I can make no causal claims about whether labour market conditions might explain any differences between the two countries.

10 Weights inserted to adjust for the attrition between the waves in Spain did not alter the results to any significant extent (results available upon request).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Research Council of Norway: [grant number 212352/H20].