Corrosive inequality? Structural determinants of educational and occupational expectations in comparative perspective

Previous research has shown that "life plan" expectations among 15 year olds are unexpectedly higher in less developed than developed countries (Saha 1992). To further explore this finding we analyse data from the 2000 and 2003 PISA surveys and find that inequality, operationalised by the Gini index, moderately but significantly increases educational and occupational expectations. This holds after controlling for academic ability, gender, family background (comprising parents' education, occupation and the size of the home library) and a number of school characteristics. Prior studies have established that economic inequality is negatively related to the actual performance of high school students. However, we find that inequality is positively correlated with students' expectations. This is counterintuitive because we know that higher expectations are related to higher levels of academic achievement. We discuss a number of theories to explain our findings and also the possible implications.