For refugees, education provides life-changing opportunities, including tools for effective social integration. This study explores higher education (HE) participation among refugee-background African youth in Australia. Drawing on policy review, national HE statistics and population census data, and using theoretical insights from critical…

If classrooms are being filled with undocumented Latino students, it is essential that teachers are trained on how to better serve this population, placing a particular focus on those students who have a passion for STEM disciplines, because the U.S. deserves a group of multilingual and multicultural student workers who will help America compete…

Critics of the college-for-all ethos argue that it encourages low-achieving adolescents to develop unrealistically high expectations. This argument posits that low-achievers waste time and money, and risk disappointment and self-recrimination, pursuing college when they are unlikely to complete it. The present study uses two national data…

Children who spend part of their childhood in foster homes have, as a group, lower academic achievement than their peers. However, some of these children do well and succeed in higher education. Resilience is about positive development enhanced by protective factors despite adversity. Protective factors may be both positive qualities in the…

This article examines the role of rapid social change for human adaptation, focusing in particular on uncertainty in educational and career-related goals of young people born between 1970 and 1990. A review of the research evidence suggests that although most young people want to continue in higher education, more young people in the later-born…

This report presents the results of The 2009 National Survey of Latinos, which asked Hispanics ages 16 and older about their educational goals, experiences with high schools and colleges, and their opinions about educational institutions. The survey was conducted from Aug. 5 through Sept. 16, 2009, among a randomly selected, nationally…

This chapter examines development through different life transitions, such as educational transitions and transition to parenthood during adolescence to adulthood in the context of the life-span model of personal goals. According to the life-span model of motivation, four key mechanisms--channeling, choice, co-regulation, and compensation--play a…

This paper is based on a small-scale mixed-method research project, which was located in south-east England and was funded by the British Academy. The project, investigated the factors that affected young people's decisions not to progress to higher education (HE) after following a Level 3 vocational pathway in upper secondary education. Set…

There is disagreement in the literature regarding the influence of social and cultural factors on the propensity for young people to undertake higher education. This study draws upon a national data set of over 45,000 young people to assesses their propensity to progress to bachelor level study, while controlling for their ethnic backgrounds,…

Ricoeur's theories of justice are used here to examine the injustice of the utilitarian drive to widen participation in higher education in the UK and, in particular, the attribution of low aspirations and achievements to those young people who do not participate in higher education. Government policy is considered through Ricoeur's theory of the…

As a service learning project, social work graduate students prepared a college information seminar and scholarship fundraiser for 15 youths in foster care. The project illustrates how students can apply learning and make a meaningful contribution to the lives of others. (SK)

Refugee young people are an educationally diverse group. However, unlike groups such as Gypsy/Roma and Travellers, in the UK they do not attract targeted educational funding. In addition, neither the UK integration or refugee educational strategies nor the Higher Education Funding Council for England's strategic plan refer to higher education as a…

Provides a brief overview of the Finnish educational system and examines the effects of family educational and socioeconomic background on access to and success in higher education. Data on 1985 and 1990 secondary school graduates and young adults indicated that children tended to aim at the same sort of education and jobs as their parents. (MDM)

Project S-114 (1977-1983) consisted of three objectives which dealt with rural Southern youth and focused on educational and occupational aspirations and attainment results for males and females, blacks and whites. Each objective involved utilization of a distinct dataset. In 1979 Objective 1 was completed; the fourth wave of a longitudinal panel…

Relative contributions of young adults' gender role attitudes, educational aspirations, certainty about careers, and importance of work and marriage as a life satisfaction source to their concurrent involvement in a dating relationship were explored for 56 male and 167 female college students. Results concern Erikson's identity development stages.…