Predictors of College Expectations Among Eighth Grade Students: The Influential Role of Parents and Teachers

Background and Purpose

Educational attainment is closely tied with adult outcomes, including income, health, and risk of incarceration. Although considerable resources have been utilized to make changes within school systems, large gaps in college completion rates remain across racial and socio-economic groups. Past research has found individual’s aspirations for college completion to be the first step toward future college attendance; however, the mechanism by which an individual develops college aspirations needs to be more fully understood. The current study seeks to identify the high school and familial factors that predict children’s expectations for college completion.

Methods

This study uses the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), a nationally representative and longitudinal study including about 21,260 kindergarteners in the 1998-1999 school year, to examine the associations between individual and family characteristics and children’s expectations for their educational attainment. A series of logit models were applied to predict children’s expectations for college completion from characteristics of the child, family, and school environment. Children’s expectations for college completion was a dichotomous variable constructed based on whether eighth grade students expected to complete a bachelor’s degree or higher (=1) or less than a bachelor’s degree (=0) in the future. Child-level independent variables included gender, race, reading test score, and math test score. Family-level variables included family income, parent’s educational attainment, and parent’s expectation for their child’s educational attainment. Characteristics of the child’s school environment that were included as independent variables consisted of how often the child felt close to teachers at school, whether they feel like classmates care about them, and how much importance their friends place on continuing their education past high school. The analyses were adjusted by the weight variable provided by the ECLS-K.

Results

Children had higher expectations for completing college when they had close relationships with teachers and had parents with high expectations for them. After controlling for demographic covariates, results from regression analyses suggest that the odds of children expecting to complete a bachelor’s degree or higher are five times higher for children who “always” have close relationships with teachers compared to children who “never” have close relationships with teachers. Additionally, the odds for expecting to complete college are over five times higher for children whose parents expect them to complete a bachelor’s degree compared to parents who expect their children to only complete high school. Furthermore, children whose parents expect them to complete a master's degree or higher are 11 times as likely to expect to complete college compared to children with parents expecting them to only complete high school. Peer-level variables were not a significant predictor of children's college expectations.

Conclusions and Implications

Parent expectations and teacher relationships are the strongest predictors of children’s future college expectations. Given the importance of college completion for a variety of outcomes and the persistent gaps in educational attainment between groups, strong relationships with parents and teachers can play an influential role in enhanced educational attainment for students.