Post-secondary school participation of immigrant and native youth: the role of familial resources and educational expectations

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Abstract

This paper extends contemporary research on educational attainment by examining how structural background and familial resources, such as parental involvement and parental expectations, are translated into differential participation in post-secondary education by first- and second-generation youth from different racial and ethnic groups. Longitudinal, nationally representative data from the 1988–1994 panels of the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) reveal that the overwhelming majority of immigrant parents expect their children to go to college or beyond. Multinomial logistic regression analysis confirms that immigrant and second-generation youth are more likely than their third or higher generation peers to complete secondary school and go on to post-secondary education despite controls for structural and family background variables. Generation status differences are mediated by educational expectations for group specific models, particularly among Asian origin youth, suggesting support for a conditional model of adaptation among immigrant youth.

Introduction

Children of immigrants have become an increasingly large component of the school age population in the United States. By 1996, 12% of 16–24-year-olds in the United States were individuals born outside the country while another 10% were the children of at least one foreign born parent (NCES, 1998). The overall immigrant population has become more diverse over the past several decades as more immigrants come from Latin American and Asian countries and fewer arrive from Europe (Passel and Edmonston, 1994). For example, in 1996, over half of all Mexican origin 16–24-year-olds were either born outside the United States or had one foreign born parent (NCES, 1998). These shifts in the ethnic and socioeconomic composition of the foreign born population have increased concern over outcomes experienced by the children of the recent arrivals in the United States and their children, the “new” second generation (Alba and Nee, 1997; Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Rumbaut, 1997).

Studying the process through which new arrivals and their children move through important social institutions in the United States is key to understanding the potential for the children of recent immigrants to achieve economic success on par with their US-born peers (Fernandez-Kelly and Schauffler, 1994). Research on the children of the “new” immigrants in the United States presents somewhat conflicting images of their educational trajectories. Some researchers point to a decline among second-generation youth while others suggest immigrant youth have access to familial resources that lead to remarkably high levels of educational attainment. Some studies of the progress of immigrants in the US education system today point to the disadvantages faced by many immigrant children such as low socioeconomic status, linguistic barriers and discrimination based on racial or ethnic origins. The results show some immigrant and second-generation youth lag behind those in the third or higher generations (Portes and Rumbaut, 2001). Other studies have highlighted the success of some immigrant and second-generation youth (those born in the US to foreign born parents) as they outperform their third-generation peers (those born in the US to US born parents) often despite structural barriers (Kao and Tienda, 1995; McKeever and Klineberg, 1999).

This divergence of research findings leads to the suggestion that adaptation of immigrant and second-generation youth does not follow the same trajectory for youth from all racial/ethnic groups. Further, still unknown is the extent to which structural or behavioral characteristics of immigrant families influence differential outcomes among some immigrants. We ask whether, in addition to structural background, familial resources (specifically parenting practices such as involvement in school, parent–teen communication, and educational expectations) will reduce nativity differentials in educational outcomes and whether these resources have a greater effect among some immigrant groups than others. While previous studies have focused on secondary school experiences, we take advantage of longitudinal data that follow a recent cohort of adolescents beyond high school in order to investigate determinants of the transitions out of high school. We examine the extent to which generation status differentials are reduced by considering structural and behavioral characteristics in pooled models and then when racial and panethnic groups are analyzed separately.

Socioeconomic status, family background and educational and occupational expectations have long been identified as important determinants of post-high school attainment (Sewell and Hauser, 1975). While past studies demonstrate support for this status attainment model, there are important differences in the effect of some measures for predicting post-secondary enrollment among youth from a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds (Perna, 2000). Some research points to the importance of family structure and poverty as key determinants of group variation in attainment (Roscigno and Ainsworth-Darnell, 1999), while other research identifies attitudinal and family behavior variables as important for explaining group-level differences (Goyette and Xie, 1999). Our focus here is on the relative impact of structural variables as well as measures of parental involvement and educational expectations on nativity differences in educational attainment.

We extend contemporary studies investigating racial/ethnic and nativity differences in educational aspirations and expectations (i.e., Goyette and Xie, 1999; Kao and Tienda, 1998; Qian and Blair, 1999) by examining how several different family characteristics including parental involvement and parental expectations are translated into differential participation in post-secondary education by immigrant and US-born youth from different racial and ethnic groups (White and Glick, 2000). Our analysis goes beyond simply using immigrant status as a suggested proxy for greater access to family and community based resources. Instead we develop educational attainment models that control nativity and ethnic composition (and even generation status within ethnic group), while directly testing for effects of parental involvement, communication, and the like. We specifically examine the possibility that, beyond structural characteristics, parental involvement and expectations account for generation status differences in subsequent educational attainment (Fuligni, 1997). We then ask whether these factors operate through their influence on adolescents’ own educational expectations to predict post-secondary education enrollment several years later.

The status attainment model provides a framework with two types of explanations that may account for the differential educational success of immigrant and US-born youth from various racial and ethnic groups: (1) structural explanations and (2) explanations based on the attributes of individuals in the groups (Louie, 2001). The structural explanations for differential educational attainment focus primarily on the barriers that may block opportunities for continued education (Hanson, 1994). In the structural argument, adjustment for the position in the social hierarchy of the United States should greatly reduce apparent generation status differences in educational attainment. The group attributes argument asserts that racial and ethnic minorities, and by extension minority youth from the first, second and subsequent generations, differ in their orientations to schooling in the United States (Ogbu, 1991). Distinguishing the effect of traits linked to these two themes becomes especially important as immigration diversifies American schools.

Several structural characteristics influence transitions out of high school. Low income, low parental education and single-parent family structure may all impede educational attainment by affecting the surrounding opportunity structure and by limiting the availability of resources within the family (Thompson et al., 1988).1 Socioeconomic background plays an important and direct role in the academic achievement of immigrants and natives alike and substantial nativity differences in educational attainment among youth are, in part, due to disparities in socioeconomic status (Wojtkiewicz and Donato, 1995). Group differences in academic performance are often attributed to differential access to resources, primarily financial resources. Previous research has also linked limited financial resources to lower expectations for children’s educational attainment (Entwisle et al., 1997). Children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds appear to maintain higher educational aspirations over time than those from lower SES backgrounds (Kao and Tienda, 1998). However, while low family socioeconomic status is clearly a contributor to poor educational outcomes (i.e., Mare and Winship, 1988), some ethnic and nativity differences remain even in the face of controls for these characteristics (Bankston et al., 1997; Kao et al., 1996; Portes and MacLeod, 1996).

Beyond socioeconomic status, other structural characteristics may influence educational outcomes by reducing the time and attention children receive in support of their academic progress. Family structure, for example, may reflect the availability of supportive related adults to devote time to children’s schoolwork and supervising their activities (Astone et al., 1999; Downey, 1995). However, results remain mixed. One study using the same data we rely upon here finds little support for the hypothesis that two parent families or even families with high levels of SES are more involved in their children’s education than others (Sui-Chu and Willms, 1996).

Other variables are also likely to reflect the availability of supportive adults. For example, residential moves may also be associated with reduced educational success by changing availability of sources of support (Astone and McLanahan, 1994). Frequent residential moves may indicate disruption of social networks and contacts outside the home as well as changes in household composition (Hagen et al., 1996; Haveman et al., 1991). While those who move are likely to have different characteristics than those who do not move, “moving itself matters” when predicting educational outcomes (Prisbesh and Downey, 1999).

Language background may also reflect a particularly important and unique structural barrier for the children of immigrants. Parents who are confident speaking English may be more willing to engage in contact with schools and thus better prepared to assist their children as they navigate through the transition from secondary to post-secondary education. However, studies also demonstrate that coming from a bilingual background can have a positive relationship with academic achievement, leading to higher achievement than coming from a monolingual background, whether it is English-only or non-English (Glick and White, 2003; Lindholm and Aclan, 1991; Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Rumbaut, 1998). Parents who speak both English and their native language are better able to assist their children by maintaining access to support and knowledge from the immigrant community while also being able to interact with other social institutions such as schools (Bankston and Zhou, 1995; Hao and Bonstead-Bruns, 1998). Although language background is not a direct measure of whether parents are blocked from interacting with school personnel, we include measures of home language background as another indicator of possible barriers to structural incorporation.

The second framework used to explain nativity differences in educational outcomes focuses on group-specific attributes. On the one hand, some minority groups may have less attachment to schooling as a route to success (Ogbu, 1991). This detachment may itself derive from histories of enslavement or colonialization and a demoralizing failure to achieve upward mobility through formal education in the American setting. This perspective has not been consistently supported by recent empirical analyses (i.e., Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998). On the other hand, groups with recent voluntary migration histories are expected to have a more optimistic view of their potential for success in the United States; they frequently come from cultural origins that emphasize formal education as a means for upward mobility and have persistent, high educational expectations (Kao and Tienda, 1998; Louie, 2001). Thus, some immigrants may actually achieve higher levels of education than their US-born peers because their families create an environment strongly encouraging academic achievement through high expectations, greater involvement with schools or close communication with children regarding school-related issues (Stanton-Salazar, 1997). We identify several “familial resources” that may explain differential educational outcomes for immigrant youth from diverse backgrounds (Lareau, 1989).

Rather than rely on proxies such as generation status to stand for interactions between families and schools, we use direct measures of parent or guardian involvement in their children’s schools. When incorporating these measures into our analyses, we recognize that parental involvement with their children’s education could reflect either actions taken affirmatively to enhance their children’s achievement or reactions to problems their children encounter. There are somewhat contradictory results from studies attempting to demonstrate the effect of parental involvement on academic achievement stemming from the definition of involvement and from how that involvement is perceived by others. Muller (1998) finds that “parental intervention” (i.e., checking homework or contacting the school) is actually negatively associated with test scores while “parental involvement” (i.e., talking with children about school) is positively associated with test scores. This suggests that parental involvement that takes place on a day-to-day level with children is beneficial and quite different from involvement that takes place once problems develop or schools reach out to the parents themselves.

We use several different measures of the type of parental involvement in children’s schooling in order to account for differences in involvement versus intervention. We also recognize that parental actions taken to enhance educational achievement could take place beyond regular schooling. Enrollment in additional academic, artistic or culturally relevant programs may all provide an environment supportive of continued schooling.

Finally, parenting practices that transmit high expectations to children serve as another resource that can influence academic achievement (Astone and McLanahan, 1991). Researchers have noted the importance of these expectations as well as high aspirations for educational outcomes. We review studies examining both expectations and aspirations here although we rely on measures of expectations (i.e., assessments of how far parents and adolescents think the adolescents will get in school) in our analyses described below.

Parental expectations influence children’s own expectations and attitudes towards school (Hossler and Stage, 1992). Higher aspirations and involvement of parents and others within immigrant families may promote high achievement (Hao and Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Kao and Tienda, 1995; Rumbaut, 1997; Vernez and Abrahamse, 1996). Further, high aspirations for post-secondary education may also reduce the negative effect of earlier poor preparation experienced by minority youth (St. John, 1991). When looking for group differences in educational outcomes, then, expectations and aspirations can be more important than other attitudinal measures (Kim, 2002).

Considerable variation in expectations and aspirations has been observed among racial/ethnic groups and by generation status. Some recent immigrants may have greater faith in the use of education to achieve upward mobility than established racial/ethnic minorities in the United States (Gibson and Ogbu, 1991). A selectivity effect may operate such that recent Hispanic and Asian voluntary migrants are particularly motivated and emphasize the importance of success—in school and at work—to their children (Kao and Tienda, 1998). By extension, then, those with less recent migration histories may have greater experience with roadblocks to educational success in the United States and reduce their educational expectations and their subsequent educational attainment. One study employing the same data we employ here suggests that immigrant youth have higher educational expectations than US-born youth, in part, because their parents have high expectations (Goyette and Xie, 1999). Yet another study on young Latino children suggests that parental aspirations remain high and stable refuting the claim that immigrant parents are an impediment to their children’s success because they place little value on school (Goldenberg et al., 2001). Although research indicates that parental and child educational aspirations and expectations are high among some racial/ethnic minorities and among immigrants, there has been little investigation into whether children fulfill their parents’ wish that they pursue post-secondary education.

Many of the studies identifying parenting practices and family characteristics that influence subsequent educational attainment are tested on native populations, frequently restricted to non-Hispanic Whites and sometimes non-Hispanic Blacks (i.e., Hanson, 1994). We investigate the extent to which structural background (i.e., socioeconomic status, family structure, language background) and parental behaviors (i.e., intervention and involvement) operate in similar fashions for youth from several racial/ethnic groups and by generation status (Kao and Tienda, 1995; Valenzuela and Dornbusch, 1994). We are specifically interested in the extent to which these characteristics that have been proposed as resources for immigrant youth actually explain generational status differences in subsequent educational attainment. In addition, our study goes beyond those examining educational expectations of immigrant and native youth as outcomes to focus on the role of expectations and other parental practices in reducing generation status differences in actual transitions out of high school.

We define parents’ educational expectations as an assessment of how far the parents anticipate the child will go in his or her education. We focus on educational expectations rather than less concrete attitudes towards education or educational aspirations because these expectations may reflect respondents’ understandings of what is possible based on their own resources and their perception of external barriers to educational attainment (i.e., Mickelson, 1990). This is even more likely with expectations measured in close proximity to the events under investigation (i.e., high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment) (Alexander and Cook, 1979; Jencks et al., 1983). Thus, “expectations” reflect not only a hope, no matter how fervent, but also some genuine element of prediction and commitment. While the line between expectations and aspirations may be a fuzzy one, our use of expectations—as operationalized in our data—is an effort to tap exactly this difference. Given that we have direct measures of family resources and student performance (and include these in our models), the performance of “expectations” should carry this prediction and commitment, net of resources available to the student. We recognize throughout that family circumstances change and that predictions (desires) cannot always be realized. At the same time, we also recognize the crucial socializing role that parents play, with parental norms a likely powerful force in child outcomes.

Parental expectations may be more important for explaining generation status differences in post-secondary schooling than other structural or behavioral measures. First, parental expectations may do more to reduce generation status differences in education than parent interactions with schools because immigrant parents are likely to face barriers to their participation in school-based activities. In other words, there may be greater returns to expectations (vs. direct involvement) among immigrant parents. Second, we expect parental expectations to be fairly robust across cultural background. The direct question regarding how far in school they expect their children to go will more accurately reflect what message children receive regardless of how that message is expressed in child-rearing practices or how parents become involved with their children’s schooling.

Finally, we ask whether the importance of structural characteristics, parental behaviors and expectations is mediated through adolescents’ own educational expectations. We anticipate immigrant and second-generation youth will have parents with higher expectations for their children’s educational attainment than third-generation youth. And, we predict that these higher expectations on the part of the parents will lead to expectations for higher education among adolescents, thereby decreasing generation status differences in post-secondary education attendance following high school. Although there is reason to believe that parental expectations are also influenced by the expectations of children themselves and by previous school performance (Alexander and Pallas, 1983; Goldenberg et al., 2001), we follow the example of Goyette and Xie (1999) and use parental expectations (and we add parental involvement) in eighth grade to predict youth expectations two years later (see also Kao and Tienda, 1998). We ask whether the influence of parental involvement and expectations on generation status differences in post-secondary enrollment are operating through the adolescents’ own expectations.

Given the wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds of immigrant youth in the United States today, we explore the extent to which our models of post-secondary attendance operate in similar fashion across five broad groups. Kao and Tienda (1998) demonstrate that there are significant differences in the stability of educational aspirations of Asian origin, Hispanic and Black youth. Therefore, it makes sense to investigate how structural background (i.e., socioeconomic status, family structure, and language background) and parental behaviors (i.e., intervention and involvement) influence actual educational attainment beyond high school among these groups as well.

Section snippets

Data and methods

Our analyses begin by documenting nativity and racial/ethnic differences in parental behaviors and expectations for the educational attainment of their children who are currently in high school. We then rely on multinomial logistic (MNL) regression to predict the likelihood of participating in post-secondary education versus other activities two years later (Perna, 2000). More specifically our MNL model contrasts post-secondary attendance (i.e., enrolled in a 2- or 4-year college in 1994), with

Structural characteristics

Most background traits, such as age, immigrant status, home language, ethnicity, and sex, are obtained from the base year of the survey (1988) when the respondents were in the eighth grade. We identify youth born outside the United States as the first generation. We can also identify the second generation based on nativity and duration of residence information for the respondents and for each parent. Youth born in the United States who have one or more foreign-born parents are identified as

Results

We first present the descriptive statistics for our sample in Table 1. The table demonstrates the considerable diversity by generation status and ethnicity available in the NELS data. In addition, the table reports frequencies for our key measures of parental involvement and intervention. Parents report a fair amount of interaction with their child’s school in 1988. Of all the involvement measures, parents were most likely to contact the school to discuss their child’s academic performance or

Conclusion

While previous research has examined the educational expectations of immigrant and native youth as outcomes, we have focused here on the role of expectations and other parental practices in reducing generation status differences in actual transitions out of high school. Specifically, we set out to examine the role of structural background (i.e., socioeconomic status, family structure, language background) and parental behaviors (i.e., intervention and involvement) on transitions out of high

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  • This research is supported by a grant from NICHD (RO1-HD37054). A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2000 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association. We appreciate the comments of the anonymous reviewers and assistance from Stacey Ruf.

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