Peer preferences and educational decisions: heterogeneous associations across student socioeconomic status

Abstract

Peers may both promote conformity and discourage ambitious choices when students make educational decisions. Low socioeconomic status (SES) students may be more sensitive to outside influence than high SES students when making educational decisions. Considering the case of choosing between an academic track and a vocational track in Danish post-compulsory education, I test whether low SES students are more prone to conform to peer preference or more likely to be deterred from choosing the more ambitious academic track by more ambitious peers. I test these hypotheses using multilevel models with school fixed effects on survey data from 882 Danish 9th^-grade students, with information on track choice and survey measures of normative track preference. I find that higher classroom peer preference for the academic track is associated with higher probability of choosing the academic track, especially for low SES students. Thus, ambitious peers may help compensate for inequality in track choice.

Keywords:

• Educational decisions
• peers
• reference group
• social inequality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 High SES students were defined as students with at least one parent having completed higher education.

2 While general information about enrolment patterns is publicly available, information about enrolment by SES groups is not.

3 Register data for student track choice was unavailable.

4 Subjects include biology, Danish, English, mathematics, German/French, physics and chemistry, geography, history, PE and social studies.

5 For a discussion on linear probability models and nonlinear probability models, see Angrist and Pischke (2009, 100).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Velux Foundation [Grant number 00017032].