Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic engagement in Guatemala with Indigenous youth, local community organizations, and transnational nongovernmental organizations, this article examines how young people imagine and work toward alternative futures at the intersection of extensive migration and a developmentalist push for educational attainment. I…

Peers' parents with a certain educational status generate spillover effects on adolescents' education outcomes through several extrinsic channels. However, evidence on the intrinsic mechanisms driving these spillover effects remains limited. Exploiting the data from China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) and a quasi-random class assignment design, we…

Why do young refugees in the Dadaab camps in Kenya aspire to gain resettlement-based scholarships for tertiary education when the odds of getting them are minimal? The existing literature sheds light on the strong educational aspirations of refugee youth. However, our understanding is obscure of why they persistently pursue lofty educational goals…

Those who have spent time in state care as children, and are therefore 'care-experienced', are known to have lower life chances than the general population. While we know that care-experienced young people are significantly underrepresented in Higher Education nationally and internationally, little is known about their progression to postgraduate…

This paper aims to determine the effect of parental education, as an important measure of social origin, on the expectations of 15 year olds to complete higher education in the Netherlands. More importantly, the paper tests specific explanations for this effect. For the empirical analysis, Dutch data from the PISA 2018 survey were used. The…

The paper theoretically examines the standing of Ukrainian educational qualifications, especially technical and vocational education and training (TVET). It assumes that the existing low social standing of TVET is related to the meritocratic principle. In this sense, this study does not examine the case of Ukraine as an example to illustrate…

Rural students' college attendance rates continue to lag behind their non-rural counterparts (Ardoin, 2018; Barr, 2018; Byun et al., 2012; Byun et al., 2015; Byun et al., 2017; Friesen & Purc-Stephenson, 2016; Hlinka et al., 2018; Longhurst, 2014; McDonough et al., 2010; Morton et al., 2018; Tieken, 2016). While the body of research…

We study the relationship between locus of control and both educational attainment and college aspirations in adolescence, focusing on the potential channels through which locus of control may influence these outcomes. Even after controlling for a comprehensive set of socio-demographic factors and cognitive skills, there remains a strong…

This study used the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) Study to examine home learning and parent attitudes to education during COVID-19 in relation to demographic and household financial circumstances and parent educational aspirations. The findings showed that White, female, and degree-educated parents were more likely than their…

First-generation college students (i.e., those whose parents do not hold a bachelor's degree or higher), enter college without the same resources, skills, and knowledge as their non-first-generation counterparts which may lead to disadvantage regarding their chosen field of study in college (Prospero and Vohra-Gupta 2007; Roksa and Levey 2010;…

This qualitative case study provides an analysis of the structuring of middle-class aspirations at one rural university in the United States. Using a Bourdieusian framework offered by Zipin and colleagues, findings suggest that although student participants in our study are similarly positioned relative to social class background, those from…

Background: We used an opportunity gap framework to analyze the pathways through which students enter into and depart from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees in an R1 higher education institution and to better understand the demographic disparities in STEM degree attainment. Results: We found disparities in 6-year…

This study aimed to identify whether motivation to learn has a statistically significant effect on intergenerational educational mobility among Brazilian university students. Although qualitative studies have proposed the existence of this relationship, quantitative evidence still needs to be discovered. We sought to identify the characteristics…

Students from a high socioeconomic background show relatively homogeneous, high levels of educational attainment, whereas students with a low socioeconomic origin display a large variability in their educational careers. In this paper, we examine whether the varying degrees of students' academic self-efficacy can contribute to an explanation of…

Attending college is a significant human capital investment but only about 60% of those who start college will have a completed degree six years later. This makes identifying the skills associated with college success an important policy concern. We surveyed over 1,100 entering college freshmen, majoring in business and engineering at a public…