The Impact of Parents’ Education and Senior Secondary School Types to College Entrance

This paper is about the students’ choice after finishing a nine-year primary education in Indonesia. The study will examine the relationship between children’s ability, parents’ educational attainment, school availability, and senior high school types attended (classified into three categories: general/academic, vocational, religious/MA). Later, we will examine the consequences of different senior secondary types attended to tertiary education entry. This study is motivated by vocational education expansion planning in senior secondary and tertiary education which is initiated by the Government of Indonesia in Ministry of Education's Educational Strategic Planning. The paper uses cross section data from Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) 2007 and 2014 as primary data and Potensi Desa (PODES) 2002, 2005, and 2008 as supporting data. Multinomial-Logit model is used to examine the senior high school types, Logit and Probit are used to examine the decision on pursuing tertiary education. The main conclusions are (1) parents with high education prefer academic senior high school than vocational high school for their children, (2) the educational facilities availability has a significant impact to the school choice, children who live in a district with vocational school share higher than general school share tend to attend vocational senior high school than academic senior high school, (3) parents’ education also has a positive and significant impact to the probability a child attending tertiary education, parents’ with higher year of schooling higher possibility to send their children to tertiary education, (4) children who attended vocational senior high school have a lower probability to enrol in tertiary education compared to those who attended general senior high school or MA.