Yong, Anna;
Schoon, Ingrid;
Shure, Nikki;
(2025)
Educational aspirations and inequality in an expanding higher education system: evidence from South Korea.
Higher Education
10.1007/s10734-025-01518-9.
(In press).
Preview |
Text
Shure_s10734-025-01518-9.pdf Download (899kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Educational aspirations are recognised as crucial mediators between social origins and educational attainment, yet their role may have evolved as higher education systems expand and become internally stratified. This study examines how educational aspirations mediate socioeconomic inequality in higher education participation during a period of massive expansion in South Korea, analysing three birth cohorts (born between 1956 and 1986) who encountered varying educational opportunities. The analysis extends the Wisconsin model of status attainment by incorporating insights from maximally maintained inequality and effectively maintained inequality theories, examining both vertical differentiation in degree levels and horizontal differentiation in institutional types in the mediation process. Using data from the Korean Education and Social Mobility Survey (KEDI-ESM), we employ multinomial logit models and decomposition analysis to reveal three key findings. First, parental education has become more strongly associated with aspirations for prestigious higher education pathways among recent cohorts. Second, the influence of these educational aspirations on access to selective universities remains largely unchanged. Third, while educational aspirations mediate a growing proportion of overall inequality in higher education participation, this mediation varies substantially across institutional types. The results highlight how, in South Korea, educational inequality persists through vertically and horizontally differentiated aspirations in expanded higher education systems.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Educational aspirations and inequality in an expanding higher education system: evidence from South Korea |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10734-025-01518-9 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01518-9 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Educational aspirations, Higher education expansion, Educational inequality, Status attainment, South Korea |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212412 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
