Educational aspirations and educational mobility of high schools students in the Czech republic

The issue of educational aspirations and educational mobility of young people in the Czech Republic is a hot topic, because due to demographic changes numerically weak classes come to high schools. Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Faculty of Management and Economics, solves research focused on comparing the professional ambitions of students at secondary schools with the current structure of the labor market, and educational aspirations of students in secondary schools compared to the actual educational attainment of their parents. This study examines a representative sample of 854 respondents from all types of secondary schools from 75 cities of the Czech Republic. The results show that the average educational aspirations of respondents are bachelor’s degree. The average variance in educational aspirations of selected ccupations equaled the value of 1.2646, which may be indicative of fairly significant ambivalence in terms of educational aspirations. There were only 42 students with zero variance, and only 82 student with relatively little variance (less than 0.4). Also vocational focus of students is small – on average, students chose 4.7 professions („definitely yes“), 15 professions („rather yes“ and „definitely yes“). When designing the online questionnaire and doing the analysis of the data the classification of occupations from A. Roe was used. While Roe argues that most people choose a profession from one of eight groups of occupation, respondents chose on average from 5.3 work groups („rather yes“ and „definitely yes“). With regard to educational mobility, it can be stated that the results showed the increase in intergenerational educational aspirations, and from this perspective, the educational structure appears not to be conserved. Significant lack of clarity of direction in aspirations of students in the labor market requires submitting the issue further explorations with the need for detailed description and explanation