Parental education and youth educational aspiration in Singapore: a path analysis in institutional and psychological context

ABSTRACT

Applying path analysis to 237 secondary school students and 320 post-secondary students in Singapore, parents’ education was found to have important effects on adolescents’ educational aspiration as mediated through educational track and adolescents’ financial stress and self-esteem. This effect is strong for adolescents in both secondary and post-secondary education, with slight differences in the specific psychological process. The findings imply calibration of education towards parity and psychosocial interventions to improve adolescents’ self-concepts, coping and aspirations. However, in the context of fast economic transformation, a burgeoning middle class, a differentiated education system, and high-income inequality, policy and psychosocial interventions will have limited effectiveness without addressing labour market disparities and the social stigma of vocational and technical education.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational track; stress
• self-esteem
• parental education
• aspiration

Acknowledgments

The authors thank National Youth Council for the data, Diana Lau and Joanna Tan for research assistance, and Nursila Senin for inputs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The partial correlations between the control variables and the other covariates are submitted as supplementary material.

2. Tables of the summary statistics are submitted as supplementary material.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irene Y. H. Ng

Irene Y. H. Ng is an Associate Professor of Social Work and Director of the Social Service Research Centre in the National University of Singapore. Her research areas include poverty and inequality, intergenerational mobility, and social welfare policy.

Hyekyung Choo

Hyekyung Choo is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the National University of Singapore. Her research areas are children and adolescents' health risk behaviors, adjustment of children from families with psychosocial vulnerabilities, and social program evaluation.