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Post-school aspirations in regional Australia: an examination of the role of cultural and social capital

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Abstract

The Australian Government’s efforts to increase the proportion of Australians with university-level qualifications has placed educational aspirations at the forefront of education policy. Despite increasing numbers of young Australians enrolling in higher education, regional and rural students continue to be underrepresented in university populations. Previous research shows that levels of social capital are positively associated with educational aspirations; therefore, in this paper, we examine the associations between access to various forms of social capital and aspirations for post-school study and employment. We conduct analysis of data collected from 460 students attending government secondary schools located in and around Shepparton in regional Victoria. Of the various measures of social capital, we focus on parent-derived social capital, discussions with parents; student-derived social capital, participation in extracurricular activities and peer-derived social capital, aspirations of their friends. We explore how measures of social capital can be used to critically make sense and engage with the post-school aspirations of young people in the increasingly precarious landscape of youth employment in the twenty-first century.

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Acknowledgements

The data analysed for this paper were collected as part of the ‘Successful transitions from education to employment: A focus on Shepparton’ Project which was funded by La Trobe University and led by Dr Lucinda Aberdeen. The survey instrument was based on the National Education Panel Study data collection which is part of the Framework Programme for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and supported by the Federal States.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Hernan Cuervo & Jenny Chesters

  2. La Trobe University, Shepparton, Australia

    Lucinda Aberdeen

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  1. Hernan Cuervo
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  2. Jenny Chesters
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  3. Lucinda Aberdeen
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Correspondence to Hernan Cuervo.

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Cuervo, H., Chesters, J. & Aberdeen, L. Post-school aspirations in regional Australia: an examination of the role of cultural and social capital. Aust. Educ. Res. 46, 843–861 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00305-7

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