Children's School Achievement and Educational Aspirations: The Role of Parents' Peer Group As Social Capital

Parental educational aspirations for their children’s educational careers have been found to be affected by the students’ school performance. Some available evidence suggests that parents with lower status background are more susceptible to these detrimental effects of poor school achievement. However, explanations for this phenomenon have not been empirically tested yet. We hypothesize that the aspirations of parents with lower social status are more reactive to constraints because of being embedded in less ambitious social contexts and are, thus, less endowed with social capital. These hypotheses are tested with data from the Mannheim Educational Panel Study (MEPS), where participants are primary-school parents in Germany. Firstly we found strong net-effects of the level and temporal development of the children’s grade-point average on the parents’ educational aspirations, which strongly decreases with increasing parental education. Secondly, aside from the children’s academic achievement, the average aspiration level in the parents’ egocentric network is found to exert significant net-effects on the parents’ educational aspirations. Thirdly, the aspirations in the peer group moderate both the effect of the level and temporal development of the children’s grades on the parental aspirations: Parents with high aspiration contexts are less willing to adapt their aspirations in view of their children’s poor educational performance. Fourthly, the compositional difference in the peer group’s aspiration level between families with different educational status explains their different willingness to adapt their ambitions to their children’s achievement reality completely. Thus, a positive attitude toward education in the parental social network serves as a protection against detrimental effects of poor school achievement and as intergenerational social capital for their children. These results are not consistent with a simple version of a rational-choice explanation of social capital utilization.