Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comparative Study
. 2019 Aug;30(8):1186-1194.
doi: 10.1177/0956797619855385. Epub 2019 Jul 9.

College Expectations Promote College Attendance: Evidence From a Quasiexperimental Sibling Study

Lauren D Brumley  1 , Michael A Russell  2 , Sara R Jaffee  1
Affiliations
Comparative Study

College Expectations Promote College Attendance: Evidence From a Quasiexperimental Sibling Study

Lauren D Brumley et al. Psychol Sci. 2019 Aug.

Abstract

When adolescents are asked how likely they think it is that they will go to college, does their answer influence what they will actually do? Typically, it is difficult to determine whether college expectations promote academic achievement or just reflect a reasonable forecast of what is likely to happen to them. We used a sample of siblings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 1,766) to test whether associations between college expectations and educational attainment remained after accounting for unobserved family factors that may shape both educational expectations and attainment. Compared with their siblings, adolescents with higher college expectations were also 43% more likely to attend college, even when analyses controlled for grades and IQ. The effect of college expectations on college attendance was strongest among youths living in higher-socioeconomic-status families.

Keywords: college; future expectations; quasiexperiment; sibling study; socioeconomic status.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Average marginal effect of college expectations on college attendance at each level of family socioeconomic status in the analytic sample of same-sex, full-biological-sibling pairs. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Allison P. (2002). Missing data (Vol. 136). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
    1. Autor D. (2010). The polarization of job opportunities in the U.S. labor market: Implications for employment and earnings. Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project. Retrieved from http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/legacy/files/downloads_and_links/T...
    1. Bauldry S., Shanahan M. J., Russo R., Roberts B. W., Damian R. (2016). Attractiveness compensates for low status background in the prediction of educational attainment. PLOS ONE, 11(6), e0155313. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155313 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Beal S. J., Crockett L. J. (2010). Adolescents’ occupational and educational aspirations and expectations: Links to high school activities and adult educational attainment. Developmental Psychology, 46, 258–265. doi:10.1037/a0017416 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Begg M. D., Parides M. K. (2003). Separation of individual-level and cluster-level covariate effects in regression analysis of correlated data. Statistics in Medicine, 22, 2591–2602. doi:10.1002/sim.1524 - DOI - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources