Gender, motivation and labour market beliefs in higher education choices
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Gender, motivation and labour market beliefs in higher education choices Peter Davies1 · Marco G. Ercolani2 Accepted: 10 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We examine relationships between motivations towards higher education choices, gender and beliefs about the financial consequences of these choices. We control for home background, school type and students’ expectations of grades they will achieve at age 16. We use a unique individual-level UK data set from a random sample of schools with a student sample size of 5012. These motivations are coded on six-point Likert scales so our modelling approach is by means of ‘multivariate ordered logit’ regressions. Boys express a much stronger motivation towards private financial gain whilst girls express stronger motivation towards occupational status and contributions towards society. We also find strong positive associations between motivation towards personal financial gain and beliefs about the financial value of a higher education. Our results support a multi-stranded theory of motivation towards higher education that takes account of beliefs about the external environment as well as self-beliefs about future academic achievement. Keywords Gender · Higher education · HE motivations · HE choices · HE financial gain · School children · Cultural capital
Introduction This paper provides new UK evidence of important gender differences in students’ motivations towards participation and subject choice in higher education (HE). Most students applying to UK universities enrol on subject-specific honours programmes from year 1. Consequently, when they are making their HE choices, the typical sequence is to decide Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1073 4-020-00625-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Peter Davies [email protected] Marco G. Ercolani [email protected] 1
School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
2
Department of Economics, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TY, UK
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Higher Education
(a) whether to participate, (b) which subject to study and finally (c) which institutions to apply to. In 2015/2016,1 56% of UK domiciled first year undergraduates in UK HE institutions were female. However, the proportion of women studying subjects allied to medicine; veterinary science and education was 82%; for mathematics and architecture, it was 34%; and for engineering and computing, it was 14%. Similar patterns in gender differences have been observed elsewhere in the world (e.g. Turner and Bowen 1999; Chanana 2006; Dickson 2010). This difference partly reflects gender patterns in subject enrolment and achievement in schools (Ayalon 2003; Crawford and Greaves 2015; Codiroli Mcmaster 2017; Davies and Ercolani 2019; Delaney and Devereux 2019). Despite some reductions in gender differences in many countries during the latter part of the last century (Fla
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