Deciding whether to attend university is one of the biggest decisions high school students will ever make, affecting their future earnings and quality of life for years to come. Joniada Milla is no stranger to making this type of decision: she’s working on her third degree, a Guelph PhD in economics. As part of her thesis, she’s looking at what factors influence a student’s decision to attend university.
Using a Canadian dataset called the Youth in Transition Survey, which followed a representative sample of students aged 15 to 23 between 2000 and 2008, Milla looked at two outcomes: university attendance and graduation.
In the 2007-2008 academic year, 35 per cent of the 23-year-old women in the survey were enrolled in full-time or part-time university studies in Canada, compared to 21 per cent of the men in the same age group. Parents and peers played a role in university attendance, says Milla.
“During high school, parents and peers have a strong effect on grades and aspirations.”
At age 15, girls tend to have higher grades than boys in high school. These girls also score higher on the Programme for International Student Assessment of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which tests students’ literacy, math and science skills. More girls than boys have university ambitions at age 15, and females are more likely to upgrade their aspirations as the get older, says Milla.
Asked whether they wished to attend university, girls who responded positively at age 15 were more likely than their male peers to respond the same way at 17. Of the 15-year-olds who said they didn’t want to attend university, 44 per cent of the girls changed their minds at 17, but only 31 per cent of the boys did so.
“All these gender differences in the persistence and revision of the aspirations contribute to the evolution of the gender gap in university attendance and graduation,” says Milla.
To find out what caused the gender gap, she looked at the influence of parents and peers on high school students’ academic performance and university aspirations.
She found that children whose parents expected them to attend university were more likely to do so than children whose parents had lower academic expectations. As a result, university-bound high school students tended to maintain higher grades to improve their chances of admission and were more likely to be enrolled in a university after graduating.
Not only did parental expectations influence their children’s decision to attend university, but those expectations also had a significant direct impact on their daughters’ probability of graduating from university. Parental expectations had no direct impact on their sons’ outcomes, says Milla.
Friends also influence each other’s academic decisions, especially for adolescents who are more vulnerable to peer pressure, she adds. Among non-academic factors, she says, “having peers who smoked cigarettes had a negative effect on both the probability of aspiring to attend university and academic achievement, and the probability of attending university and graduating.”
Milla says she hopes the study will lead to programs that encourage parents to influence their children, especially boys, to increase university attendance and balance the gender gap in graduation rates in Canada. For example, schools could counsel parents and students about the importance of getting a degree and its effect on future earnings and standard of living.
Milla, who is originally from Albania, did her undergraduate degree at Marmara University in Turkey and completed her master’s degree at Guelph in 2008. She credits her own parents for inspiring her to attend university.
She co-authored the study with economics professors Michael Hoy and Thanasis Stengos, and professor emeritus Louis Christofides. She presented the first chapter of her thesis,“The Implication of Peer and Parental Influences on University Attendance: A Gender Comparison,” at the European Association of Labour Economists held in Cyprus in September 2011.