Ambitions and Social Origin: Educational Decisions Between Status Maintenance and Status Advancement

This study examines the association between parents’ and students’ status aspirations and the educational choices of students from different socioeconomic status (SES) groups in Germany. Drawing on different research traditions and considering ceiling and floor effects, we analyze how striving for status maintenance versus status advancement relates to the transition to upper secondary and tertiary education among different SES groups. For the empirical analyses, we use data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) in Germany and apply segmented logistic regression models. Our analyses reveal that striving for upward mobility instead of status maintenance increases the probability of students from low SES backgrounds to make ambitious educational decisions. In the case of extremely high aspirations, they even catch up with the medium SES group but still have lower transition probabilities than students from high SES origins who strive for status maintenance. While we do not find any floor effects, we observe some indications for a ceiling effect among the high SES group. Our findings mainly speak in favor of status reproduction theories but extend this perspective by emphasizing the role of striving for status advancement in explaining variance in educational decisions among students from low and medium SES backgrounds.