Social origin and expectation of postgraduate enrolment among spanish university undergraduates mediation and moderation effect of fields of study and grades

The effect of social origin on educational expectations has mostly focused on adolescents. Yet, the expansion of higher education across the OECD area has made the transition from bachelor to master programs increasingly consequential for inequality of educational opportunities and social mobility. Applying multinomial logistic regression to data from a survey carried out in 2018 among university students in three Spanish regions, our research reveals the existence of a still meaningful effect of socioeconomic origin on expectations of postgraduate enrolment among university undergraduates, even after controlling for academic progression, performance and choice of field of study. In other words, the analysis provides evidence of a secondary effect of social origin on educational expectations at this late stage of the educational career. Multinomial logistic regression and the Karlson-Holm-Breen method applied to the same data also reveal the inexistence of a mediation effect of field of studies or academic performance. In this sense, our evidence points at a clearly higher weight of the secondary effect, rather than the primary effect of social origin, on the transmission of educational advantage to expectations of postgraduate enrolment among undergraduates. Yet, a moderating effect of both fields of studies and academic performance does exist. As regards field of studies, against our initial expectation, the effect of social origin turns out to be stronger in some fields of studies with better labour market access (strong fields). Regarding academic performance, the sensitiveness of postgraduate enrolment expectation to grades obtained so far decreases with social origin, thus revealing a lingering compensatory effect of social origin at the end of the educational trajectory.This work was funded by the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Ministry of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain) under the research project number CSO2016-80399-R “El ascensor social a revisión: oportunidades de acceso y progresión universitaria por origen social” (Principal Investigator: Luis Ortiz-Gervasi)