Educational Aspirations and Expectations

In recent years there has been growing concern over the pervasive disparities in academic achievement that are highly influenced by ethnicity, class and gender. Specifically, within the neoliberal policy rhetoric, there has been concern over underachievement of working-class young males in the United Kingdom, specifically white working-class boys. The historic persistence of this pattern, and the ominous implication of these trends on the long-term life chances of white working-class boys, has led to a growing chorus that something must be done to intervene.

This book provides an in-depth sociological study exploring the gendered and classed subjectivities within the neoliberal ideology of the school environment, in order to expand the understanding of white working-class disengagement with education. Chapters discuss how white working-class boys in three educational sites experience social and learner identities, focusing on the practices of "meaning-making" and "identity work" that the boys’ experienced, and the disjunctures and commonalities between them. The book presents an analysis of the varying tensions influencing the identity of each boy and the consequences of these pressures on their engagement with education.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical tools, gendered habitus and a model of egalitarian habitus, Identity, Neoliberalism and Aspiration in White Working-Class Boys will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of sociology of education, and those from related disciplines studying class and gender.

The present study was an attempt to explore the influence of gender roles on boy-child educational aspirations in secondary school in Nakuru County, Kenya. The question of educational aspirations among Kenyan boys has become the subject of concern. It is against this background that the need for this study was envisaged. The researcher employed a causal comparative (ex-post facto) design in the study. The study involved a sample of 420 Form three boys in secondary schools. Research instruments used in collecting data were questionnaire and interview schedule. A pilot study was carried out to ensure reliability of the instrument. Internal consistency was determined through the use of Cronchbach's alpha formula and a coefficient of 0.867 was obtained. Expert judgment was employed to establish the validity of the research instrument. The finding from this study revealed that gender roles significantly influenced boys' educational aspirations. It is anticipated that the study will aid to develop greater insights into the above factor influencing the boy-child educational aspirations in public secondary schools for the purpose of improving the quality of education in Kenya. Knowledge of such factors would be useful to government, parents and teachers since it may guide in formulating strategies that may improve boys' educational aspirations

The identity and academic performance of students from ethnic minorities in UK
schools is an ongoing area of research in social justice and education. This study was
designed to give voice to 13-14 year old students of Pakistani heritage concerning
their identity and academic aspirations. As underachievement for this group of
students has been well documented, this study takes the perspective of the students to
explore how they conceive their educational aspirations within the framework of
identity formation. 
The qualitative empirical research took place in an urban town, with a quota sample
of 11 boys and girls at the end of YR9 during the months of June and July 2013. Data
were obtained through focus groups and individual interviews using a constructivist
grounded theory approach. The participants discussed influences on their identity
such as community, faith and family as well as locational issues of how they
identified themselves at home, in their community and at school. Educational
aspirations were explored in more depth individually. 
The data speaks of gendered experiences intersecting class, race, faith and group sub
cultures that affect participants’ views about their education and careers. The study
also found that location, historic timing and media influences add further layers to
the way identities were constructed. The results of the study highlight a greater need
for communication between all stakeholders in a student’s education; the community
sector, parents and the school. This is imperative in order to sustain continuity of
high academic expectations and effective role models to challenge deficit discourses.
It recommends that only when this partnership strengthens will equality of
opportunity be truly enacted for students of this profile.

This book presents a detailed ethnographic study conducted in an urban slum in India. It explores how a State school, as a social and pedagogic institution, shapes the aspirations and worldviews of children in the urban margins. The volume engages with the children's experience of marginality and exclusion as they negotiate the intersecting axes of caste, class, gender, and citizenship. It further explores how their everyday school experience is mediated by the power asymmetries between the teachers and the community. In this process, it makes sense of the political dynamics between the State and its margins while highlighting the role of schools and locating childhood in this context.
The book will be of interest to researchers, students, and teachers of education studies, sociology and politics of education, teacher education, childhood and youth studies, and urban studies. It will also be useful for education policymakers and professionals in the development sector.

Link: https://www.routledge.com/Schooling-and-Aspirations-in-the-Urban-Margins-Ethnography-of-Education/Sharma/p/book/9780367903657

This thesis examined the expectations and value of education among low to moderate income African American male and female adolescents and the contributing factors; perceptions of parents, teachers and neighborhood quality to the academic related gender disparity among high school students. A mixed method approach of quantitative and qualitative strategies was utilized to study the gender disparities of educational expectations. The quantitative analyses showed that perceptions of teachers’ and parents’ expectations were correlated with students’ expectations and value of education. The analyses also showed that some demographic variables were correlated with expectations and value of education. The qualitative methods revealed that most African American females planned to attend college directly after high school. The majority of African American males planned an alternative route with few stating they planned to attend college directly after high school. Also, both males and females expressed higher attainment for African American females

Educational aspiration is one of the crucial determinants of a personns success in life. It is influenced by a number of factors. The present study was an attempt to explore the influence of teachers gender on boy-child educational aspirations in secondary school in Nakuru County, Kenya. The question of educational aspirations among Kenyan boys has become the subject of concern. It is against this background that the need for this study was envisaged. The researcher employed a causal comparative (ex-post facto) design in the study. The study involved a sample of 420 Form three boys in secondary schools. Research instruments used in collecting data were questionnaire and interview schedule. A pilot study was carried out to ensure reliability of the instrument. Internal consistency was determined through the use of Cronchbachhs alpha formula and a coefficient of 0.867 was obtained. Expert judgment was employed to establish the validity of the research instrument. The finding from this study revealed that teachers gender significantly influenced boys educational aspirations. It is anticipated that the study will aid to develop greater insights into the above factor influencing the boy-child educational aspirations in public secondary schools for the purpose of improving the quality of education in Kenya. Knowledge of such factors would be useful to government, parents and teachers since it may guide in formulating strategies that may improve boys educational aspirations.

Over the last few decades, youth aspirations and post-school transitions have become the focus of much research, particularly in economically-developed countries such as Australia. In October 2010, Australia’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education organised and held a conference with the theme ‘Aspiration, Mobility, Voice’. The event was followed by a special issue of Critical Studies in Education (CSIE), which included articles and discussion notes by the contributors and keynote speakers of the conference. The main aim of the CSIE special issue was to enhance thinking on efforts to widen participation in higher education (HE) and improve student equity (Gale 2011). Its authors discussed new ideas and opinions about student equity in HE (Sellar and Gale 2011), with an emphasis on disadvantaged students (Parry 2011). A number of contributors highlighted how, despite good intentions, the modern conceptualisation of ‘aspiration’ risks establishing disadvantaged young peo ...

This article examines the post-school pathways of Russian-speaking students in Ireland after completing secondary education; the importance of personal and institutional factors in shaping their transition process, and the role of parents and schools in achieving the post-school goals. The article draws on the qualitative exploratory study of 14 Russian-speaking migrant-origin students, to see how this group progresses beyond secondary schooling in the Irish education system. The study found that all participants had high educational aspirations. Most students achieved their desired first-choice post-school pathway, despite coming from a different linguistic and cultural background. The article points to a range of factors, which affect the post-school transition of migrant young people. The findings are discussed in light of Ireland's liberal welfare state model with neo-liberal tendencies where those in positions of power can buy into the advantages of the more neo-liberal side of the regime.

Latino boys and young men often carry the debt of violence into different spaces. This invisible trauma manifests into disruptive behaviors in schools. It is well documented that violence in urban communities and schools has received significant attention from researchers, but little attention has been paid to Latino male youth as individuals and the various forms of violence they have experienced, and how that impacts educational persistence. This qualitative study focuses on 26 Latino male middle and high school students who are attending two continuation schools to understand the types of violence they have experienced and their educational aspirations after high school.

"The documentaries used in this intervention can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqfoNjCzt8YPjTRWQaMQfAg/feed.

Poor people often do not make investments, even when returns are high. One possible explanation is that they have low aspirations and form mental models of their future opportunities which ignore some options for investment. This paper reports on a field experiment to test this hypothesis in rural Ethiopia. Individuals were randomly invited to watch documentaries about people from similar communities who had succeeded in agriculture or business, without help from government or NGOs. A placebo group watched an Ethiopian entertainment programme and a control group were simply surveyed. In addition, the number of people invited was varied by village to assess the importance of peer effects in formation of aspirations. Six months after screening, aspirations had improved among treated individuals and did not change in the placebo or control groups. Treatment effects were larger for those with higher pre-treatment aspirations. We also find treatment effects on savings, use of credit, children’s school enrolment and spending on children’s schooling, suggesting that changes in aspirations can translate into changes in a range of forward-looking behaviours. There are also treatment effects on measures from psychology and sociology, including locus of control, which theory predicts should behave in similar ways to aspirations. Most effects are robust to corrections for multiple testing. Peer effects result in further impact on educational spending and induce more work and less leisure. The result that a one-hour documentary shown six months earlier induces actual behavioural change suggests a challenging, promising avenue for further research and poverty-related interventions.

Following decision theory (Boudon, Raymond. 1974. Education, Opportunity, and Social Inequality: Changing Prospects in Western Society. New York: Wiley.), social origin strongly affects educational decisions, especially
at transition points in educational attainment. In Japan, the fierce competition in gaining access to the next level of schooling intensifies the impact of educational decisions on students’ future careers. In addition to
selecting a certain school, families are forced to decide whether or not to invest in shadow education. Thus
far, socioeconomic background and parents’ educational aspirations, in conjunction with students’ academic
achievement, have been deemed influential to such decisions in Japan. The agency of the student is rarely even considered. Based on calculations from the 2011 Hyōgo High School Students’ (HHSS) survey, the theoretical approach presented in this article stresses the importance of acknowledging the existence of a multitude of actors involved in each phase of the decision-making process, including the students themselves, especially when explaining inequalities in modern societies.

For the whole paper visit: https://academic.oup.com/ssjj/article/doi/10.1093/ssjj/jyv012/1623097/The-Decision-for-Shadow-Education-in-Japan

The aim of the article was to address the relevance of cultural capital and relative risk aversion theories for educational outcomes and aspirations of upper secondary school students in Croatia, and to examine whether these approaches are compatible in explaining educational inequalities. Linear and logistic regressions were used to analyze data from 2106 students in their last year of upper secondary school (16-18 years old). Both constructs, cultural capital and relative risk aversion, had positive effects on school performance, enrolment of gymnasium instead of vocational school and aspirations for higher education. The analyses indicated that cultural factors frequently associated with school performance should not be separated from more direct status concerns shaping educational decisions. Rather than seeing them as unrelated, these mechanisms may both be seen as constitutive of students’ educational dispositions.

Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics, this study presented an ecological approach to examining the individual, family, and school factors that facilitated or impeded postsecondary education attendance. Historically, a core of factors including academic achievement, parents' educational attainment, parents' educational aspirations, and household income, has been consistently identified as predicting college attendance. In addition to those variables, this study revealed three additional factors: extracurricular activities, employment, and parents' educational aspirations for their child, which provided a unique contribution above that of the aforementioned core factors to the outcome of college attendance.

Não obstante a tendência geral de admissão da mudança social, uma grande porção das vozes interna- cionais identifica a Europa do Sul enquanto um dos principais locus face aos maiores desafios económi- cos, políticos e desenvolvimentais. Os jovens, no seu percurso entre a infância e a idade adulta, explici- tam os alicerces das sociedades contemporâneas, na medida em que transparecem questões tais como papéis e responsabilidades face à própria sociedade que os alberga. Neste artigo procuraremos apresen- tar a evolução de alguns aspectos que caracterizam os jovens portugueses, de 2004 até ao presente, bem como a sua variação regional e por género, nomeadamente no que concerne à situação pessoal, perspectivas sobre educação e emprego, bem como atitudes políticas e modalidades de participação social. Os dados apresentados têm sido colectados ao longo das edições do Dia da Defesa Nacional, que se desenvolvem por todo o país, numa amostra que cobre a grande maioria dos rapazes com 18 anos de idade em cada ano, ao que se acrescenta a recente tendência de inclusão de raparigas da mesma idade, desde 2009.

The social field in the modern globalized world includes groups of people with differentiated national and cultural characteristics. These groups possess their own system of dispositions, which are primarily shaped within the context of the family. The purpose of this study is the investigation and presentation of young people’s aspirations and choices concerning their educational future as these are influenced by factors which are related to the phenomenon of migration, through a review of recent scientific literature. From the analysis of the research findings of relevant scientific papers, the influence of socio-economic, cultural and institutional factors on the formation of young people’s educational aspirations/expectations and choices emerges. Family habitus, as well as the institutional habitus that exists within the academic institutions, tend to contribute significantly to the decisions and choices young people make which define their educational course. In particular, most research findings converge on the fact that education constitutes a means of social mobility offering the opportunity to young people from underprivileged family environments to ‘transform’ and/or improve their position in the field of social stratification. As a result, young people aspire to pursue higher education studies though the mobilization of a ‘transformative’ habitus, anticipating that it will improve the terms, conditions and prospects of their life in the future.

Empirical data on the aspirations of young women and girls in postconflict settings are scarce. This article analyses the factors associated with the educational and career aspirations of 2,473 young women and girls in Sierra Leone. Findings indicated that over three-quarters of our sample aspired to continue their studies up to the university level, and two-thirds aspired to obtain a formal sector job requiring an education. These findings are important for discussions of aid which can accelerate economic advances and opportunities within advanced economies for both women and men.

The aim of the article was to address the relevance of cultural capital and relative risk aversion theories for educational outcomes and aspirations of upper secondary school students in Croatia, and to examine whether these approaches are compatible in explaining educational inequalities. Linear and logistic regressions were used to analyze data from 2106 students in their last year of upper secondary school (16-18 years old). Both constructs, cultural capital and relative risk aversion, had positive effects on school performance, enrolment of gymnasium instead of vocational school and aspirations for higher education. The analyses indicated that cultural factors frequently associated with school performance should not be separated from more direct status concerns shaping educational decisions. Rather than seeing them as unrelated, these mechanisms may both be seen as constitutive of students’ educational dispositions.

In response to the limited literature on the causes of lower educational aspirations of rural students, this study examined the parental factors related to educational aspirations of rural youth. Although previous studies examined the relationship between certain parental factors and students' educational aspirations in isolation, through a discriminant analysis, the present study investigated combinations of parental factors that were most likely to predict higher levels of educational aspirations for rural students. The results corroborated past research on the influence of parental educational attainment on student educational aspirations. Additionally, the results suggested that the educational aspirations that students perceive their parents having for them are more influential than their parents' actual educational aspirations for them.

In recent years there has been growing concern over the pervasive disparities in academic achievement that are highly influenced by ethnicity, class and gender. Specifically, within the neoliberal policy rhetoric, there has been concern over underachievement of working-class young males in the United Kingdom, specifically white working-class boys. The historic persistence of this pattern, and the ominous implication of these trends on the long-term life chances of white working-class boys, has led to a growing chorus that something must be done to intervene. This book provides an in-depth sociological study exploring the gendered and classed subjectivities within the neoliberal ideology of the school environment, in order to expand the understanding of white working-class disengagement with education. Chapters discuss how white working-class boys in three educational sites experience social and learner identities, focusing on the practices of "meaning-making" and "identity work" that the boys’ experienced, and the disjunctures and commonalities between them. The book presents an analysis of the varying tensions influencing the identity of each boy and the consequences of these pressures on their engagement with education. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical tools, gendered habitus and a model of egalitarian habitus, Identity, Neoliberalism and Aspiration in White Working-Class Boys will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of sociology of education, and those from related disciplines studying class and gender.

According to sociological rational choice theory, students’ class-specific educational decisions at key transition points significantly contribute to educational and social inequalities. Yet, while theory missed to clearly accentuate all relevant actors’ influences on students’ decisions, research generally failed to adequately empirically account for students’ individual share in such decisions, but attributed their choices to family background and academic achievement. Drawing on the Japanese case, a refined rational choice model reflecting multiple (f)actors’ influence on students’ decision-making is introduced, before new evidence on students’ actual share in high school choice since the 1990s is presented. Comparative multinomial regressions show the following main findings: (1) Students with concrete educational plans decisively impact their high school choice even when controlling for family background and academic achievement. Students thus clearly impact their own educational pathways and whether inequalitites are reproduced. (2) In spite of the recent policy shift towards more individual choice, students’ own educational plans have not become considerably more influential for their final high school placement in 2009 compared to 1995, implying similar constraints for individual choice still. Academic achievement remains decisive for school choice in Japan, as juku have taken over former functions of placement counselling.

Although the social stratification of educational aspirations is well documented for parents and adolescents, current educational inequality research largely ignores the perspective of children. To learn more about the involvement of children in the emergence and reproduction of social disparities, we examine children’s educational aspirations during elementary school. Based on the Wisconsin model, rational choice approaches, and the theory of cultural reproduction, our explorative investigation aims to identify determinants of young students’ idealistic and realistic aspirations. We utilize a sample of 4947 third grade students from Starting Cohort 2 of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The multivariate results indicate that students’ aspirations are influenced by their parents’ social position and aspirations, whereby the students’ self-rated rational choice indicators assert the greatest impact.

The unemployment rate for 15 to 19-year-olds is currently 20.1% in Australia. This is over three times the national rate of 6.3% and almost double the unemployment rate of this age group during the first year of the Global Financial Crisis, 10.7%.
This means that one in five young people is actively looking for a job. The longer they are unemployed, the harder it is to join the workforce.