Academic or Vocational Education? Parents’ Expectation and Preference at Age 13 and Their Children’s Adult Educational Attainment and Earnings in a Swedish School Year Cohort

When their children were 13, the parents of a school-year cohort in a midsize town in middle Sweden reported which schooling orientation (academic or vocational) they preferred for the child and which they expected the child would take. This paper interprets these two answers as proxies for parental investment in schooling: preference captures the direction of the aim, while expectation captures how far the parent believes it will be realized. The research design cannot disentangle parental push from parental foresight, so the estimates are interpreted as conditional associations. Instead, it leverages the joint measurement of preferences and expectations at the same age, rich background controls, and long-run register follow-up to describe how these two dimensions of parental schooling orientation relate to their children's later attainment and labor-market outcomes. Linking the cohort to Swedish administrative registers half a century later and conditioning on socioeconomic group, parental education, sex, birth-year group, and measured cognition at the same age, parental expectation is associated with higher adult schooling, while parental preference, holding expectation fixed, is more closely related to mid-career earnings than to schooling , with no corresponding association with late-life subjective well-being. Parents' post-compulsory expectation at age 16 maps onto their children's realized schooling in a steep, monotone gradient, from a 7 percent post-secondary share where parents expected immediate work to 75 percent where they expected a three-year academic upper-secondary program.