We examine relationships between motivations towards higher education choices, gender and beliefs about the financial consequences of these choices. We control for home background, school type and students’ expectations of grades they will achieve at age 16. We use a unique individual-level UK data set from a random sample of schools with a student sample size of 5012. These motivations are coded on six-point Likert scales so our modelling approach is by means of ‘multivariate ordered logit’ regressions. Boys express a much stronger motivation towards private financial gain whilst girls express stronger motivation towards occupational status and contributions towards society. We also find strong positive associations between motivation towards personal financial gain and beliefs about the financial value of a higher education. Our results support a multi-stranded theory of motivation towards higher education that takes account of beliefs about the external environment as well as self-beliefs about future academic achievement.

我们研究了选择高等教育的动机，性别和对这些选择带来的经济后果的信念之间的关系。我们控制家庭背景，学校类型和学生对他们在16岁时将达到的成绩的期望。我们使用来自学校的随机样本（学生样本大小为5012）的独特的个人级别英国数据集。这些动机的编码是六点李克特量表，因此我们的建模方法是通过“多元有序logit”回归进行的。男孩表达出更多的追求私人经济利益的动力，而女孩表达出更高的追求职业地位和对社会贡献的动力。我们还发现，个人财务收益的动机与对高等教育财务价值的信念之间有很强的积极联系。