Disentangling the interplay of the sense of belonging and institutional channels in individuals’ educational trajectories

Accumulating evidence indicates that students’ sense of school belonging has a substantial positive effect on educational attainment. At the same time, life course and life span developmental theories suggest that the benefits of a sense of school belonging could be weakened by the channeling effects of education systems that assign students to distinct educational tracks that lead otherwise similar students to quite different educational destinations. The current study analyzed the extent to which the sense of school belonging predicted educational trajectories in a system that partially channels students into distinct tracks. It assessed educational trajectories as they relate to transitions at two critical junctures of the system—the transition from lower- to upper-secondary education, and from upper-secondary to tertiary (university) education. The study used data from a nationally representative panel survey that followed participants from age 15 to 30 (N = 4,986, 44% male, 12.9% immigrants). Findings indicated that students with a stronger sense of school belonging were more likely to continue in or transition into academic tracks. However, the benefits of students’ sense of belonging were bounded by the system’s channeling structure. While for students in academic tracks, the sense of school belonging strongly predicted the probability of continuing in academic tracks, it only marginally predicted the probability of moving into academic tracks for those whose educational career began in more vocationally oriented tracks. Hence the sense of school belonging may influence academic trajectories only inasmuch as institutional structures allow it to, because these structures differentially enable and constrain such trajectories