Educational aspirations and inequality in an expanding higher education system: evidence from South Korea

Abstract Educational aspirations are recognised as crucial mediators between social origins and educational attainment, yet their role may have evolved as higher education systems expand and become internally stratified. This study examines how educational aspirations mediate socioeconomic inequality in higher education participation during a period of massive expansion in South Korea, analysing three birth cohorts (born between 1956 and 1986) who encountered varying educational opportunities. The analysis extends the Wisconsin model of status attainment by incorporating insights from maximally maintained inequality and effectively maintained inequality theories, examining both vertical differentiation in degree levels and horizontal differentiation in institutional types in the mediation process. Using data from the Korean Education and Social Mobility Survey (KEDI-ESM), we employ multinomial logit models and decomposition analysis to reveal three key findings. First, parental education has become more strongly associated with aspirations for prestigious higher education pathways among recent cohorts. Second, the influence of these educational aspirations on access to selective universities remains largely unchanged. Third, while educational aspirations mediate a growing proportion of overall inequality in higher education participation, this mediation varies substantially across institutional types. The results highlight how, in South Korea, educational inequality persists through vertically and horizontally differentiated aspirations in expanded higher education systems.