In Japan, despite women’s improved access to higher education, still only one in five applicants to the nation’s top university are women. This presentation focuses on the role of high school students’ “imagined futures” in the context of highly uncertain admission and diversified higher education to provide explanations for the underrepresentation of women in Japanese selective universities. It draws on data from qualitative interviews with high school seniors and teachers in high schools where almost everyone goes to college. In contrast to the expectation that students in these schools are homogeneous in terms of meritocratic aspirations, this study finds significant gender differences in “aiming high.” This presentation provides theoretical insights into how gendered imagined futures and macro-level contexts combine to allocate men and women with similar academic potential into different educational and occupational trajectories, with implications for inequality in higher education in other sociocultural contexts. Details and registration here