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The main aims of Finnish educational policy in the 1980s were to raise the standard of education and to promote educational equality, but there has been a shift in goals in the 1990s. At present, however, society and education stress individuality and optionality. Also the recent experiment on a higher vocational education (polytechnics) in Finland is based on these starting points. Further, the introduction of polytechnics represents a new educational level in the Finnish educational system. This study is a part of the larger research project which explores the experiment of higher vocational education in different vocational programmes. The purpose of this study is to explore students' educational aspirations in commercial polytechnics in relation to their social background and gender. One specific problem is whether family background continues to be related to the students' choices. This study includes 217 students from commercial polytechnics. The data were collected with a questionnaire in the spring of 1993. The results of this study suggest that students seemed to make choices according to family background so that the mother's education was related to the interest in continuing their studies in general and the father's education was related to the status of the intended education. Besides, there was no relationship between gender and the intention to continue studies in the university.