The willingness to fund post-secondary studies with a student loan among Finnish upper secondary school students

The aim of this study is to find out whether gender and parental education level are determinants to the willingness to take risks in general, if the willingness to fund upcoming post-secondary studies is affected by gender, parental education level, risk attitudes, the expected future salary and the employment rate from a chosen field of future education and is there a relationship between the willingness to fund post-secondary studies with a student loan and the highest degree planned to complete.The data set which is used in this study is collected from 59 randomly chosen high schools from 18 provinces in Finland and it is a representative sample of Finnish upper secondary school students. The data set has 3,437 respondents in total of whom 1980 (approximately 58 percent) are female. In the survey almost every (more than 99 percent) respondent is between the age of 17 and 19. The main findings of this thesis are the following. I do not find reliable evidence that gender or parental education level influence to the individuals’ risk attitudes measured by a general risk question. I do find evidence that gender and parental education level affect to the willingness to fund post-secondary studies with a student loan. In the linear regression where the dependent variable is the willingness to fund post-secondary studies with a student loan and independent variables are; gender, parental education level, risk attitude, expected future salary and expected employment rate the coefficients for gender and parental education level are -0.170 and 0.082, respectively. Both of the coefficients are statistically significant at 1 percent significance level when holding other independent variables constant. These results indicate that females are less willing to fund the upcoming post-secondary studies with a student loan and that there is a positive relationship between the parental education level and the willingness to take a student loan; the higher is the mean education level of parents the more willing the student is to take a student loan. No evidence was found that the willingness to take risks, measured by the general risk question, expected future salary from a chosen field of future education or the average employment rate from a certain field have an impact to the willingness to take a student loan. There is a positive correlation between the highest degree planned to complete and the willingness to fund post-secondary studies with a student loan