Impact of life strategies of school graduates, success at school and their parental resources on children’s aspirations in Ukraine and Georgia - Статья

This analysis addresses the question of formation of school youth aspirations toward their future social status: desired level of education, mode of occupational activity, range of supervision at future work place and desired location in the social hierarchy. Various comparative surveys conducted in Ukraine and Russia indicate rapid growth of material and social aspirations within school graduates on the eve of the Soviet Union dissolution (Magun and Engovatov 2004, Rutkevich 2002) [1, 2]. In particular young people at the beginning of 1990-s showed much higher aspirations toward living standards, future social standing and the level of education to be attained than their peers in 1985 (Magun 1998) [3]. The scholars specified that this growth did not go in parallel with the growth of welfare of school graduates’ parents and with recognition of the social cost to be paid for obtaining high status in society. Opening of ideological borders made it possible for consumerism ideology to come from the West, however, for achieving high living standards not everyone was able to find “socially approved means” (Merton 1938) and agree to pay the price for these standards: to work hard, to delay gratification of whishes and so on. The scholars qualified the aspirations of school graduates of early 1990-s as “inadequate” to the reality, in which they live. What kind of reality confronted the aspirations of the young at that period of time? Macroeconomic and structural changes were really dramatic at that time in post-communist societies. Development of private educational institutions in the 1990-s widened the opportunity to enter university, however, high pay for the study there and growing cost of living in large university cities made the chances to enter university highly differentiated and dependent on parental resources of the applicants. In the late 1990-s Russian sociologists were able to provide the evidence of strengthening of class basis for chances to enter university: children of managerial staff had more chances to enter university than all other categories of the applicants (Konstantinowsky 1999) [4]. On the other hand longitudinal analysis made in Ukrainian and Russian cities showed growing misbalance of benefits and costs within young generation; this is to mean that motivation to work hard for the sake of the future status was not correlated with growing aspirations (Magun 1998) [3]. It turned out that there are two basic sources of “inadequacy” of the aspirations of the young: improper estimation by the children of their parents’ resources and inadequate cost-benefit balance concerning individual talent and motivation to fight for a better human lot. The question is which explanation - class based limitations or personal abilities and motivation - is more useful for the explaining of aspirations of the young in post-communist societies. Do the relative importance of these factors change in time? The pioneering study of the school graduates’ aspirations started in Soviet Russia and Ukraine by V. Magun and E. Golovakha in 1985 (Golovakha 1988) [5] provided the empirical evidence of the growing material aspirations in 1985-1990 that enabled them to formulate the hypothesis about the “revolution of aspirations” (Magun 1998) [3]. However, after the conducting of the consequent waves of the study in 1995 and 2001, Magun and Engovatov reported about the decrease of school graduate aspirations in Russia and Ukraine and simultaneous increase of motivation to work hard for the future success (Magun and Engovatov 2004) [1]. The researchers resumed that the aspirations became more down to earth, or more “adequate”, probably because of the experience of the market society: both growing costs of education and growing return for human capital. This means that young people recognize both structural and personal limitations for obtaining high social status and living standard. In order to prove this, two factors, structural limitations, from the one side, and personal motivation, from the another, will be compared and juxtaposed in the following analysis. The studies conducted in Western countries during last three decades show ever strengthening reproduction of parents’ social status by children (Shavit and Blossfeld 1993, Raftery and Hout 1993) [6, 7]. It is indicated that educational attainment is the key mechanism of reinforcing social inequality in developed countries. The demand for higher education remains continuingly high despite the fact that salaries of many professional positions stopped to grow that made Western scholars to start to talk about deflation of education (Boudon 1974) [8]. Adherents of class approach explain persistent inequality in the “world of equal opportunities” by repeatable attempts of parents who have access to material and human resources to provide opportunities for their children to maintain high social class of their parents. Comparative studies done by M. Kohn and C. Schooler expl