Previous empirical findings cast doubt on the question whether, in highly stratified education systems, interpersonal influences on students’ expectations exist after students have been tracked into different secondary school types. Against this background, we examine the effects of parents and friends on the educational expectations of secondary school students in the highly stratified German education system. For the analyses we use unique representative data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). In addition to standard cross-sectional analyses, school fixed-effects models and longitudinal fixed-effects panel regressions are conducted, which make it possible to rule out a large number of factors that might be responsible for a spurious relationship. Across all analyses, we consistently find substantive influences of parents and friends on the expectations of secondary school students.
