Differences in College Expectations By Mother's Immigrant Status: A Propensity Score Matching Approach

Background and Purpose

Immigrants come to the United States in search of a better life, but they frequently find themselves in socio-economic disadvantage. Immigrant parents tend to be low income and have poor educational attainment. While these are typically associated with a variety of adverse educational outcomes for children, it is unclear whether this trend extends to immigrant parents or if a paradox exists. Research suggests that there is an immigrant paradox, wherein despite immigrants’ severe economic and social disadvantages, they tend to have better health and engage in less crime than native-born residents. Limited research, however, has applied the immigrant paradox to educational outcomes. The current study examines whether differences in college expectations exist for middle school students based on mothers’ immigrant status.

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 maternal characteristics and children’s expectations for their educational attainment. Propensity score matching was utilized to match children who did and did not have an immigrant mother. Child-level matching variables included gender, race, and individualized education plan (IEP) status. Family-level matching variables included family income and parent’s educational attainment. Nearest neighbor matching without replacement matched an immigrant child with his/her closest non-immigrant child. Using the matched sample, a series of logit models were applied to predict children’s expectations for educational attainment from mother’s immigrant status, with the aforementioned matching variables included as covariates in logistic regression. Children’s expectations for educational attainment was a dichotomous variable constructed based on whether children expected to complete a bachelor’s degree or higher (=1) or less than a bachelor’s degree (=0). The analyses were adjusted by the weight variable provided by the ECLS-K. 

Results

Children of immigrant parents had higher expectations for their educational attainment. After controlling for covariates, results from regression analyses suggest that the odds of children expecting to complete a bachelor’s degree or higher are over four times higher for children of immigrant mothers than children of native-born mothers (OR=4.23, SE=0.86). Additionally, descriptive analyses using both the matched and unmatched sample indicate that the propensity score matching process yielded more similar groups based on mother’s immigrant status, reducing bias associated with regression analyses. 

Conclusions and Implications

Despite socio-economic shortcomings, children with immigrant mothers have significantly higher expectations for their educational attainment than children of native-born mothers. Most parents come to the United States in search of a better life for their children and, as a result, their children hold themselves to higher expectations. While children of immigrants may be disadvantaged in the classroom as a result of lower income and language barriers, high educational expectations can be a powerful tool to foster academic outcomes for this population.