Another choice after finishing secondary school: university or work? Does the decision taken earlier - on the choice of secondary school - affect the decision to be taken four years later? Behind every (further education) decision there are manifest and latent variables. The target population of our research is the senior students in Harghita County. We use a multistage group sampling. In the first stage, all the Hungarian-language theoretical high schools (lyceums) in the Szekler county (Harghita) were included in the sampling frame, and pairs of vocational high schools were matched. We were interested to find out which factors and arguments induce students' decisions for or against further education. The family background effect is also present in students' post-secondary school decisions, since there is little discrepancy between investment risk and probability of success for children of higher-status parents, and the same applies to the gap between aspirations and actual achievement.