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Expecting less in hard times: How the state of the economy influences students’ educational expectations

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Ambitions that students and their parents set during their adolescence have significance across the life course. It is yet unclear, however, how these expectations respond to changing family circumstances. In this work, we examine how negative family economic shocks affect educational expectations for students and their parents by using two theoretical perspectives – status attainment and adopt-adapt models. Further, we move beyond these debates about the malleability of expectations by considering how this malleability might differ by your place in the social structure. We thus make hypotheses about how social class may buffer or amplify the effect of negative family economic shocks on educational expectations. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we expand our conceptualization of educational expectations beyond degree expectations to include educational institutional route expectations—the educational pathway that students plan to take to achieve their degree expectations. We find that degree expectations are only somewhat malleable, but that route expectations are malleable. Family economic shocks served to reduce students’ and parents’ expectations for beginning their post-secondary education at a B.A.-granting institution. Further, we find support for the amplification hypothesis rather than the buffering hypothesis; the expectations of middle-class students and parents prove more negatively responsive to family economic shocks than do those of their lower SES counterparts. This work has implications for examining the dynamic nature of the status attainment process and suggests that expanding educational expectations to include institutional route may be vital for understanding social mobility in the current educational climate.
Chapter
The following sections present two research traditions that are often used as a point of departure for models of educational aspirations, expectations and choice (Konczal and Haller 2008; Lloyd et al. 2008; Morgan 2002) and constitute the theoretical basis of the empirical study. The concept of educational aspirations experienced its breakthrough in the sociology of education in the context of the development of the celebrated Wisconsin model (Sewell et al. 1969; Sewell et al. 1970; cf. Paulus and Blossfeld 2007), which emerged in the status attainment literature in the late 1960s and constitutes one of the first attempts to introduce social-psychological variables into earlier models of intergenerational mobility.
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This study presents an estimate of the joint determination of labour market status and educational attainment in Australia using cross-sectional data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This paper is based on the premise that achieving an increasing level of educational attainment and labour supply does not happen in isolation, rather they are determined jointly. Applying a simultaneous system of two-equations model, the study finds that there is a feedback effect between educational attainment and labour market status. In the labour market equation the effects of achieving a higher educational attainment on the probability of being employed has been statistically significant and the effect is negative. Thus, previous studies that ignored the feedback effects and used a single equation model have produced biased and inaccurate estimates of the effects of educational attainment on labour market outcome.
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Educational expectations are not perfect forecasts of how much education students will acquire. Nonetheless, we should not treat educational expectations as affective fantasies or status-based value orientations. Educational expectations are educational intentions, generated from rational calculations of the costs and benefits of educational training but subject to constant revision in response to new information. This conclusion is supported by an analysis of the association between family-background-adjusted educational expectations of high-school seniors and earnings returns on educational investments of labor market participants between the ages of 26 and 35 years. After an adjustment for family background differences, White high school seniors had lower educational expectations than Black high school seniors in the late 1970s, but increased their expectations relatively more than Black students in the 1980s. Earnings returns on education follow similar patterns across race and sex groups. If educational expectations are overly optimistic, but still based on reasonable cost-benefit calculations, then they can be considered rational fantasies. Further research is needed to determine whether this last possibility is supported by empirical evidence.
Article
Data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 were used to investigate variables that predicted stability of adolescents' postsecondary educational expectations from Grade 8 to 2 years after high school. The study included students who had early expectations for at least a bachelor's degree as well as 8th-grade reading or mathematics test scores that were below the median. All participants had high early expectations and comparatively low early achievement. Six years later, approximately 76% of the participants still had high expectations, whereas 24% of them no longer expected to earn a bachelor's degree. Results provide support for the addition of variables to the social cognitive model of educational achievement when predicting long-term educational expectations and attainment.
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This paper draws upon data collected from 20 working class, inner city pupils in a British (London) school (in Year 11, aged 15/16 years) as part of a research study exploring the ways in which young people understand their options and identities. Pilot study data is used to develop an analysis of the processes through which inner city, working class young people come to leave school at the age of 16. Attention is drawn to issues of identity and inequality within processes of leaving education. In particular, we highlight the ways in which the young people viewed themselves as ‘not good enough’ and ‘knew their limits’ in relation to post-compulsory educational routes. It is suggested that these views were constructed and compounded by complex social and institutional factors, and were exacerbated by educational policies that impact upon inner city ‘failing’ schools and disadvantaged communities.
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The empirical link between education and health is firmly established. Numerous studies document that higher levels of education are positively associated with longer life and better health throughout the lifespan. But measuring the causal links between education and health is a more challenging task. Aside from the typical econometric concerns about measurement error, functional form, and sampling properties, measuring the causal impact of education on health is confounded by the likely causal effect of health on education, and vice versa. Concerns about 'missing' variables that affect both the accumulation of human capital and the health capital - such as measures of individual discount rates - also make causality difficult to measure. Despite the difficulties, there has been a marked surge over the last decade in the number of empirical studies attempting to estimate the causal links between education and health. This survey reviews recent empirical evidence on the topic. Following the bifurcation in the literature, we split the survey into two pieces. First, we review the evidence of the effect of education on health. The vast majority of work in this area focuses on schooling up through college and its effect on adult health, including longevity. Second, we review the evidence of the effect of health on education, including health shocks in the womb and their effects on educational attainment. Rather than attempting a comprehensive review, our focus is to highlight relatively recent research.
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In this paper I assess the impact of the youth labour market on enrolment in post‐compulsory education. To that end, I construct data for a panel of English regions and identify youth labour market effects using variation in youth unemployment rates across regions and over time. My estimates suggest that the youth labour market has large enrolment impacts, at least twice as large as suggested by UK estimates based on time series data. This helps to explain why enrolment growth slowed down from the mid‐1990s and suggests that a weakening youth labour market could cause enrolment to increase again.
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This paper studies the labor market experiences of white-male college graduates as a function of economic conditions at time of college graduation. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth whose respondents graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. I estimate the effects of both national and state economic conditions at time of college graduation on labor market outcomes for the first two decades of a career. Because timing and location of college graduation could potentially be affected by economic conditions, I also instrument for the college unemployment rate using year of birth (state of residence at an early age for the state analysis). I find large, negative wage effects of graduating in a worse economy which persist for the entire period studied. I also find that cohorts who graduate in worse national economies are in lower-level occupations, have slightly higher tenure and higher educational attainment, while labor supply is unaffected. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that the labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy are large, negative and persistent.