Abstract

The Czech Republic is preparing for the introduction of tuition fees at state universities. The economic context of the introduction of these fees is important and much-debated. A prime beginning of the debate, however, should be a consistent and representative analysis of the educational aspirations of students. This article focuses on this problem. Aside from analyzing educational aspirations, one of the key goals is an analysis of the relationship between such aspirations and a student’s professional aspirations. It was one of the reasons why a research team used two-dimensional classification of occupation by A. Roe with construction of primary research. Data were gathered by an online survey with 468 respondents. The research team examined the relationships between parents' educational attainment and educational aspirations of their children, connection between educational aspirations and gender, and interest of students to pass the state high school exam. Finally, declared educational aspirations were compared with professional aspirations and the corresponding average educational aspirations of respondents. The obtained results show the potential risks in terms of the introduction of tuition fees in the Czech Republic.