Where do I come from and where am I going? Socio-cultural capital and young women’s educational transitions in South Africa

Annah Vimbai Bengesai, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, progress has been made in developing a democratic and equitable education system. In spite of this, South Africa still exhibits low mean years of schooling (9.9 years) as a consequence of high dropout rates. This has raised the question of what enables or hinders successful educational transitions. Increasingly, there is recognition that socio-cultural facilitates or hinders their negotiation of these transitions. Using three waves of the National Income Dynamics Study (South Africa), this study sought to model the influence of social capital on the probability of making the following educational transitions: primary school completion, high school completion and post-secondary education completion. A retrospective methodology is adopted to disentangle the effect of events occurring in one trajectory on those in another. In particular, the study applies a sequential logit model to estimate transition probabilities of passing through key educational transitions.