Abstract
Adults’ career choice is not an abrupt event, but an outcome of continuous development throughout childhood and adolescence. In the developmental process of one’s career, personal characteristics and contextual resources come into play. The goal of the present study is to examine how family socioeconomic status, adolescents’ vocational aspirations, and high school contexts affect their occupational attainment in young adulthood, using two cohorts of data from the Korean Education and Employment Panel. Cohort 1 consisted of 1535 individuals (49.3% female), and cohort 2 consisted of 1473 individuals (53.5% female). Both cohorts were surveyed during their senior year of high school (Time 1; Mage = 17.8) and followed up until young adulthood (Time 2; Mage = 25.8). The results reveal that having high vocational aspirations and attending academic high school predict attaining higher-status occupations for both cohorts. Family background has positive direct and indirect effects on occupational attainment for cohort 2, while it only has an indirect effect on occupational attainment via types of high school for cohort 1. Implications in the context of constructing social systems to support adolescents’ career development are discussed.
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Notes
Korea’s educational system consists of three levels: primary school (grades 1–6), middle school (grades 7–9), and high school (grades 10–12). Primary and middle school are compulsory, and there is no between-school tracking at these levels. Upon graduation from middle school, students move into either an academic or a vocational high school. Beginning in the 11th grade, academic high schools offer two curriculum tracks: liberal arts (i.e., humanities and social sciences) and natural sciences (i.e., math and science). The choice of which curriculum track to follow is determined largely based on student preference rather than on academic achievement (Byun et al. 2012; Byun and Park 2017).
The birth year of the adolescent participant was asked to parents (or guardians) in the base year of the KEEP study.Age was calculated by deducting the birth year from the data collection year. Coincidentally, this resulted in thesame mean age in both cohorts.
For example, the KECO system does not classify teachers (code 045) in much detail, but the ISCO-08 system has three subgroups: vocational teachers (group 2320, ISEI score of 65), secondary teachers (group 2330, ISEI score of 71), and primary and early-childhood teachers (group 2340, ISEI score of 57). In this case, the average score of the three prestige scores of the ISCO-08 occupations was used. Using this coding method, physicians, teachers, and assemblers were assigned scores of 89.0, 64.3, and 29.0, respectively.
In an earlier phase of the current study, we used parental occupational and household income only as indicators of SES. Model estimates of the path coefficients were almost identical between the 2-indicator and 3-indicator model.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence.
Authors’ Contributions
B.L. conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, conducted analysis and drafted the manuscript; S.B. conducted analysis and participated in drafting the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding
Soo-yong Byun received support from the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea; the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A3A2066878); and the Population Research Institute at Penn State University, which is supported by an infrastructure grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD041025). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies.
Data Sharing and Declaration
Original data are shared online through the website of the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training (https://www.krivet.re.kr/). Occupational data that were coded in terms of the International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Lee, B., Byun, Sy. Socioeconomic Status, Vocational Aspirations, School Tracks, and Occupational Attainment in South Korea. J Youth Adolescence 48, 1494–1505 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01056-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01056-5