Middle School Predictors of College Aspirations

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 individual- and family-level predictors of eighth grade aspirations for completing college.

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 eighth grader’s expectations for their educational attainment. Multi-level logistic regression models were used to predict youth’s expectations for college completion from characteristics of the child, family, and school environment. 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. Individual-level independent variables included reading test score, math test score, approaches to learning, internalizing behavior, and whether child had a disability. Family-level matching variables included parent’s expectation for their child’s educational attainment, parent-child relationship, and parent’s involvement at child’s school. Covariates included in analyses consisted of race, gender, age, socio-economic status, school test scores, and school disadvantage. The analyses were adjusted by the weight variable provided by the ECLS-K.

Results: Youth had higher expectations for completing college when they had higher test scores, better approaches to learning, and parents with high expectations for them. After controlling for demographic covariates, results from regression analyses suggest that the odds of youth expecting to complete a bachelor’s degree or more are three times greater for youth whose parents expect them to complete a master’s degree or higher, compared to parents who expect their children to only complete high school. Additionally, every one-point increase in youth’s approaches to learning was associated with a 3.84 times greater odds of aspiring to attend college.

Conclusions and Implications: Parent expectations and childhood approaches to learning are the strongest predictors of youth’s future college expectations. Given the importance of college completion for a variety of outcomes and the persistent gaps in educational attainment between groups, positive learning approaches and parent encouragement can play an influential role in enhanced educational attainment for students.