Exceptional expectations: The influence of student and parent attainment belief on degree completion outcomes

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Higher education SIG roundtable 3

Proposal

To foster the ideal of sustainability, education is often seen as an arbiter of development through growth in access and attainment. That is to say, if more people have access to education and can complete successively higher levels, that there will somehow be an inherent increase in how to best address the need for a sustainable planet. The premise, of course, is that with more education comes a greater understanding of how the world works and what needs to be addressed to maintain the place we live. Along with that, the common thought is that as individuals prosper educationally, their actions regarding their place among a global humanity expand so that they may consider unknown others in their local actions.

In my research on higher education attainment among immigration generations, race, and income classes, the variable which far and away provided the highest prediction probability of a student completing post-secondary education at the bachelor’s degree level or above was the expectation that they would do so. As importantly, when parental expectations were aligned with the same belief, students were shown to be over nine times as likely to complete college at these levels (Hopp, 2018). There is significant research evidence supporting the concept of expectations as a prelude to future academic achievement (Fan & Chen, 2001), as well as the concept of parental expectation as an indicator of higher education success (Lippman, et al., 2008), and the premise that parents of immigrated children have high expectations for them and see encouragement and a focus on aspirations as some of the most important ways to influence their education (Kao & Tienda, 1995).

The cultural capital theoretical framework is based in Pierre Bourdieu’s social and educational reproduction. His position that cultural capital is an accumulated asset that can be built and transferred through the lineage of family is a structural component of educational achievement (Bourdieu, 1977). I maintain that expectations form a kind of family capital which mirror the concept of his cultural construction. Higher education attainment develops a lineage in which students build this capital account and expend it through the sustainability platform once they have met the standard of Bourdieu’s institutionalized state – the college degree.

My quantitative study of higher education attainment used the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) of 2002 and its third follow-up of 2012 as the dataset. In this I applied binary logistic regression to predict the outcome of university degree completion and tested the variable of expectations by students, parents, and in combination. I find that expectations are a key element in student attainment and, as the nation matures and becomes more diverse, this variable can play a substantial role in closing the gaps between race, income, and generational groups.

This roundtable will explore the premise of expectation as a predictor of attainment, and position the practical applications of expecting students to reach higher levels of post-secondary education as a bridge to the goal of adding diverse voices to the conversation and actions on sustainability.

Author

• Sam Hopp, Lehigh University