Creating a hierarchy of opportunities? The effects of high school tracking on adolescents' postsecondary career outcomes in Japan

High school tracking in Japan, defined by school ranks and curricular programs, creates different and unequal opportunities for postsecondary education and employment, thereby playing an important role in educational stratification and social mobility. This research is motivated by three issues that are important, but have been undermined in stratification studies in Japan: (1) postsecondary educational and job-market entry outcomes among graduates from low-tracked high schools, (2) institutional mechanisms acting as constraints on those outcomes, and (3) the relationship of those outcomes to the stratification system. I examine these issues by focusing on the instructional and institutional effects of tracking.; The purpose of the dissertation is threefold: (1) to examine track differences in adolescents' postsecondary educational and job-market entry outcomes, (2) to contrast the influences of individual resources with those of tracking and job market conditions on postsecondary outcomes, and (3) to evaluate the extent of academic meritocracy as a mechanism for distributing educational and job opportunities. The empirical analyses are based on a survey of seniors enrolled in five general and nine vocational high schools in 1996 in an urbanized prefecture in Japan.; I find significant effects of types of schools on adolescents' educational and job-entry outcomes, and noncognitive dispositions, but insignificant instructional effects of tracking on educational and job-entry outcomes. High school ranks have little effect on postsecondary outcomes due to the sample of students drawn from schools with low selectivity. Contrary to the hypothesis, those in vocational programs have greater access to college education than their general school counterparts despite their deficiency in academic coursework. General school students, however, are more likely to enter a non-college training school than students in vocational schools.; This study offers evidence of a weak influence of family background on educational and job-entry outcomes mediated by academic achievement among lower-tracked students. Only guardians' college aspirations for their children have a significant positive effect on the likelihood of college attendance. The overall results strongly support that academic meritocracy operates powerfully in the distribution of educational and job opportunities for Japanese adolescents immediately after high school.