January 30, 2023

Associate Professor Irene Ng and Associate Professor Hyekyung Choo (both NUS Department of Social Work) consider the range of factors that can affect educational attainment in ‘Parental education and youth educational aspiration in Singapore: a path analysis in institutional and psychological context’ (Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 2020).

A/P Ng and A/P Choo identify the four trends specific to Singapore that form the background to their current study:
(1) Since 1965, Singapore has experienced an incredible pace of growth that has led to a nation that has quickly matured and urbanized.
(2) The nation’s incredible level of development has resulted in the formation of a new middle class that possesses sufficient financial resources to acquire positional goods, which are goods that signal their new status; education for their children is one of these key positional goods.
(3) The transformation from a universal education system to one that is highly stratified and tiered.
(4) The increasing levels of income inequality among Singaporeans which has widened significantly since the 1980s.

The four trends have worked together to place an intense psychological pressure on successive generations of young Singaporeans to perform well within the highly academic-oriented culture of the nation-state. A/P Ng and A/P Choo draw on comparisons with Hong Kong’s education system, where past research showed that parental SES (socio-economic status) directly affected learning support, but not necessarily the students’ levels of self-esteem or educational aspirations. The purpose of the current study was to determine how parental SES affected the self-esteem and aspirations of Singaporean students.

The data was sampled from the National Youth Survey (2013), which was nationally representative of youths aged 15 to 34, with 237 participants in secondary education and 321 participants in post-secondary education. The results revealed that the self-esteem and educational aspirations of both secondary and post-secondary students were directly affected by their parent’s SES, and that this manifested itself most prominently through a positive correlation within educational streaming.

The article stresses the need for the government to dismantle education’s role in perpetuating this pervasive intergenerational class gap, as what was once Singapore’s main driver of social mobility has now become clearly stratified in terms of parental SES. A/P Ng and A/P Choo provide possible solutions, such as not publishing PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination) results and encouraging schools and universities to look beyond simply academics. However, they concede that the probable reality is that stratification through streaming, programs, and specialised schools is likely to remain and even expand within the near future.

Read the full article here.