"The Link Between Educational Expectations and Effort in the College-for-all Era"
Associate Professors Thurston Domina and AnneMarie Conley and Professor George Farkas will present at the Sociology of Education Association conference in Monterey, February 20-22: "The Link Between Educational Expectations and Effort in the College-for-all Era."
Abstract
From the Wisconsin status attainment model to rational choice, classical sociological, social-psychological, and economic theories of student educational transitions have assumed that students' aspirations and expectations are positively related to their ultimate attainment. However, recent critiques of the college for all ethos question that assumption. Noting that American students' educational expectations rapidly outpaced their educational attainments, several scholars have suggested that increasingly unrealistic expectations have perverse negative effects on the engagement of American high school students. In our paper, we test the relationship between student expectations and effort using data from a unique longitudinal study of student motivation and three national cohort studies. Contrary to the college for all critiques, we find that educational expectations continue to have robust positive effects on student perceptions regarding the future utility of high school academics and student effort in high school. Although the relationship between expectations and effort is somewhat weaker today than it was in 1980, our analyses indicate that the expansion of college expectations has had a net positive effect on American high school students' effort.
