Investigating the role of educational aspirations as central mediators of secondary school track choice in Germany

Educational aspirations are known to be one of the most relevant predictors of secondary school choice after finishing elementary school in the German educational system. Since aspirations themselves mostly derive from the social background of a family, the question arises whether aspirations can be understood as a mediating factor explaining how social origin determines choice of school. In addition to that, it would be of great interest to disentangle parental and filial aspirations to better understand which factor is more relevant for the decision. After proposing a unified theoretical model that accounts for both primary and secondary effects of social origin, the analyses attempt to quantify the share that is mediated through aspirations and hence test the model empirically. Using large scale panel data, I can demonstrate that aspirations explain a considerable share of the variance of the decision for choosing a school track in secondary education (ca. 24% points). The following analyses estimate that the indirect effect of social origin that is mediated through aspirations amounts to almost 80%, which means that the residual pathway must therefore be small in comparison. Detailed analyses reveal that especially parental realistic aspirations explain the major share of this effect (about 42%) and their aspirations will be decisive when conflicting with the aspirations of their children.