What Influences the Self-Educational Expectations of China’s Migrant Children in the Post-Pandemic Era

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing societal changes, even along the trajectories of international tourism, educational development, and training systems. Existing research has demonstrated that scholastic attainment, parental educational expectations, and school type have significant impacts on the self-educational expectations of migrant children. Nevertheless, there is still insufficient research on the differences in subject grades, parental educational expectations when it comes to choices regarding specific learning phases, and the impact of school types on specific learning phases. Taking “self-educational expectations = high school degree and below” as the control group, we selected the data of migrant children in grade nine from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) and employed multinomial logistic regression (MLR) to investigate the factors affecting the self-educational expectations of China’s migrant children. The results showed that the standardized scores of Chinese children and the math scores of migrant children only have a significant positive impact on their self-educational expectations for either a doctoral degree or master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree, respectively. Parental educational expectations will greatly facilitate the self-educational expectations of children when these are generally consistent with the type of choice of their children’s self-educational expectations. School type only plays a part when the self-educational expectations of migrant children are to attain a bachelor’s degree. The results can help us understand the differences in the educational expectations of parents and their children; guide parents to positively view their children’s scholastic attainment, emotions, and development goals; and help schools fairly allocate high-quality educational resources in promoting the integration of students from different backgrounds.