More individual choice? Students’ share in decision-making at the transition to high school in Japan (1995-2009)

ABSTRACT

According to sociological rational choice theory, students’ class-specific educational decisions at key transition points significantly contribute to educational and social inequalities. Yet, while theory missed to clearly accentuate all relevant actors’ influences on students’ decisions, research generally failed to adequately empirically account for students’ individual share in such decisions, but attributed their choices to family background and academic achievement. Drawing on the Japanese case, a refined rational choice model reflecting multiple (f)actors’ influence on students’ decision-making is introduced, before new evidence on students’ actual share in high school choice since the 1990s is presented. Comparative multinomial regressions show the following main findings: (1) Students with concrete educational plans decisively impact their high school choice even when controlling for family background and academic achievement. Students thus clearly impact their own educational pathways and whether inequalitites are reproduced. (2) In spite of the recent policy shift towards more individual choice, students’ own educational plans have not become considerably more influential for their final high school placement in 2009 compared to 1995, implying similar constraints for individual choice still. Academic achievement remains decisive for school choice in Japan, as juku have taken over former functions of placement counselling.

KEYWORDS:

• Rational choice theory
• school choice
• educational plans
• social inequality
• shinro shidō
• shadow education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this paper, the terms “aspirations”, “plans”, “expectations” and “preferences” are used as synonyms, since all these terms reflect individuals’ future goals, which they intend to achieve through their decisions.

2. In this paper the terms “decision”, “choice” and “transition” are used as synonyms, since each transition is understood as the outcome of a decision-making process when choosing a certain school.

3. In their study, Kariya and Rosenbaum (1987) found strong effects of students’ own educational plans on the rank of later attended high school, but completely omitted socio-economic background variables in all their analyses.

4. According to Bray (2017, pp. 669–70), shadow education is academic in nature (excluding forms of out-of-school education such as arts or sports lessons), supplementary (not covering classes outside the school spectrum), and private (commercial in nature and always fee based).

5. Juku are privately run, fee-charging supplementary schools and the main provider of shadow education in Japan. For a detailed definition and description of the various juku types see Entrich (2018).

6. Original Japanese title: Kōkōsei no shinro to seikatsu ni kansuru chōsa = ‘A survey concerning the pathway and life of high school students’.

7. In addition to general academic and vocational schools, families can also choose upper secondary specialized training schools; miscellaneous schools; and night schools (for those unable to enter other high schools) (MEXT, 2017a; Tsukada, 2010).

8. The yutori reforms reduced the overall compulsory school curriculum by 30%, shortened the school week from a six- to a five-day school week, and induced the integrated study period to foster students’ creativity and individuality starting in 2002 (Bjork, 2016).

9. The persistence of this market is believed to be primarily based on a high level of insecurity among Japanese parents, who fear that their children could lose in the educational competition and thus send them to juku (Dierkes, 2013), and the surprisingly high flexibility of this industry, which managed to successfully adapt to changing circumstances in a remarkable way (Entrich, 2016a, 2018).

10. From October 2012 to September 2013 I visited several juku located in the Kansai area (Kyoto and Osaka), Shiga Prefecture (Kusatsu), Tokyo (Setagaya) and Fukushima Prefecture (Iwaki), inquiring about motivations to attend juku and its implications for social inequality. Therefore, I interviewed their operators, had personal conversations with students, parents, and teachers, and collected questionnaires from 500 middle and high school students as well as 100 juku teachers at 20 juku (for details see Entrich, 2018).

11. In the HHSS surveys, the participating high school students were asked about the time they decided for a certain path at the end of their school careers, i.e., in 12th grade. In contrast to panel data, which measure the same cohort at different points in time to reveal causal relationships of certain variables, this kind of measurement depends on how well the respondents have knowledge of and can assess the information of an earlier point in time. Since the transition to high school marks one of the most important transition points and this point lies only three years in the past, the used retrospective data are deemed a very reliable measure of students’ post-high school educational plans in middle school.

12. I also calculated a basic RC model without controlling students’ juku attendance in middle school. The inclusion of this variable did not change the effects of family background and academic achievement.

13. These additional results are available from the author upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steve R. Entrich

Steve R. Entrich is a Post-Doc Research Fellow at the Graduate School for East Asian Studies (GEAS) at the Freie Universität Berlin. He graduated with a Master’s degree in History and Educational Sciences at the University of Potsdam, before studying Japanese at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Following his stays as a “visiting graduate student” at Dōshisha University, Kyoto, and as a scholarship fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, in 2012 and 2013, in 2016 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Potsdam for his thesis on shadow education in Japan.