Parental expectations for young people’s participation in higher education in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines factors affecting parental expectations of higher education prospects for their children using Australian household survey data. We find that a variety of factors influence parental expectations, of which parents’ assessment of their children’s academic performance is the strongest. Factors known to impact upon actual higher education participation, such as parental education and remoteness, are already evident in parental expectations, but with limited evidence of expectations being shaped by financial constraints. We also find evidence of a ‘same gender’ effect, with mothers exhibiting higher expectations for higher education for their daughters. This may be in part due to significantly lower expectations held by fathers with sub-bachelor qualifications. These factors contribute to higher expectations overall for girls entering university. The research points to the importance of interventions commencing in early childhood, and accounting for key household background characteristics when designing, implementing and evaluating programmes for widening participation in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Aspirations
• parental expectations
• higher education participation
• socio-economic status
• family

Acknowledgement

This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See http://www.melbourneinstitute.com/hilda/ and Watson and Wooden (2010) for details on the survey.

2 A follow up to this module was included in the Wave 16 HILDA collection in 2016, with data from this to be released in December 2017.