Search results

During the past few decades, South Korea has experienced a remarkable educational expansion at its secondary and tertiary levels as well as at the primary level, resulting in extraordinary variation between the educational attainment of recent and older cohorts. Using 1990 data from the Social Inequality Study in Korea, the study examines trends in the influence of social background on educational attainment across three male cohorts born between 1921 and 1970. Although in general the impacts of social origin have changed little at the secondary levels of education, there is a significant reduction in the effect of father’s occupation on the odds of completing middle school for the youngest cohort. From a multinomial model of transitions to each type of tertiary education, it is found that family background has a stronger effect in the transition from high school to four-year university than to junior college. Interestingly, there has been an increase across cohorts in the influence of father’s education on the likelihood of entering a university, while such a pattern is not observed for the transition to junior college.