The Mismatch Between Educational Expectations and Attainment: Explaining Race and Socioeconomic Differences

Kimberly Goyette

Sociologists concerned with racial and socioeconomic inequalities in education often puzzle over the large mismatch between educational expectations and attainment among African Americans, Latinos, and students with low socioeconomic status (SES). Poor students hold expectations that are comparable to those of wealthier students, and the expectations of African American and Latino students are similar to those of whites and Asian Americans, yet these students maintain rates of college attendance that are far lower. I begin to explore this puzzle by examining the formation of educational expectations across race and SES. Based on the life course perspective, I contend that students may use different paths to form expectations, and these paths may relate to race and socioeconomic status. Analyzing data from the 1988 wave of the National Educational Longitudinal Study, I evaluate three hypotheses. First, I suggest that minority and low-SES students’ expectations are influenced less by family characteristics than are those of whites and high-SES students. Minority and low-SES students may feel that due to their parents’ relative inexperience with higher education in the U.S., parents are a less reliable source of information. Results from this research support this hypothesis. Family class background and composition matter less in forming minority students’ expectations than they do in forming those of whites. Further, parents’ educational expectations for students matter less among low-SES students than they do among high-SES students. The second hypothesis I evaluate is that minority and low-SES students rely more on extra-familial sources of information to assess their chances of achieving higher education. Perhaps because parents are not perceived as reliable sources of information, peers and teachers become more important in the formation of minority and low-SES students’ expectations. Support for this hypothesis is mixed. While teachers’ praise and the perceptions of friends matter more for low- than high-SES students’ expectations; among African American students, teachers’ perceived approval appears to matter less than it does among whites. Finally, I test the hypothesis that school context matters differently across race and class. Again, results are mixed and in surprising directions. While the proportion of the school receiving free lunch affects all students positively, low-SES and African American students experience a greater positive influence on expectations of having lower-SES peers.

About Kimberly Goyette

Kimberly A. Goyette is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Temple University. Her areas of interest are education, race and ethnicity (with a special interest in Asian Americans), stratification, immigration, and family and household demography. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with a specialization in population and demography from the University of Michigan in August 1999. Her dissertation compared the process leading to college attendance across whites and Asian Americans of different ethnic groups. Along with her National Academy of Education postdoctoral fellowship project of exploring the mismatch between educational expectations and attainment across race and class, her recent research has focused on comparing the financial returns to a post-secondary education that are gained by whites and Asian Americans; parsimoniously describing the educational and occupational stratification of Asian Americans; exploring the types of social capital held by recent immigrant, minority groups; and investigating the influence of social class on students’ college major choices and decisions to attend graduate school.