The Influence of Education Expectations and Depression on Educational Attainment

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

The number of adolescents expecting to graduate from college has been rising dramatically over the last few decades (Goyette, 2008; Martin & Gardner, 2016; Trusty, 2000). However, there is a significant gap between adolescents who expect to complete college and those who earn a college degree. Only 60% of first-time, full-time undergraduates at a four-year postsecondary institution graduate within six years of enrollment (NCES, 2019). Mental health may contribute to the discrepancy between those who meet their expectations versus those who do not. In fact, the American College Health Association (2019) reported in a study of over 67,000 college students that 34.2% of respondents reported stress, 27.8% reported anxiety, and 20.2% reported depression as having negatively affected their academic performance in the past school year.
The present study investigates the following questions: 1) Does the expectation for a bachelor’s degree in adolescence predict educational attainment in adulthood? and 2) does depression in adolescence and early adulthood influence educational attainment? We hypothesize that that education expectations predict education attainment, and higher levels of depressive symptoms in adolescence and early adulthood will be related to fewer years of schooling.
The present study utilizes the public-use data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Add Health is a longitudinal study of adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States beginning in 1994 and consists of four waves of data collection with the most recent being in 2008 (Harris et al., 2009). The present study draws on all four waves of Add Health’s public-use dataset. Measures include participants’ demographic information (e.g., gender, race, and age), family income, primary caregiver’s education level, participant IQ, post-secondary education expectations, high school GPA, a nine-item version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) at each wave of measurement, and educational attainment in the final wave. Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for the dataset.
Data analysis is on-going and is expected to be completed in December of 2020. Analyses will include confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to determine how well survey items represent the latent construct of depression across all four waves of data. In addition, cross-lagged structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques will be used to investigate the first and second research questions. The conceptual model is presented in Figure 1. All analyses will be conducted using the Lavaan package in R and missing data will be addressed using the full information maximum likelihood (FIML) procedure.
Results of the study will have both theoretical and practical implications. Previous research has demonstrated that educational expectations and mental health are linked to educational outcomes (Brumley et al., 2019; Fishman, 2019; Fletcher, 2010; Needham, 2009), but no study using Add Health data has included both variables in a conceptual model. Further, results will offer insights to parents, counselors, and higher education administrators as to why adolescents achieve or do not achieve their educational goals and could prompt discussion of best practices to support adolescents who wish to pursue post-secondary education.

Authors

• Madison Sewell, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Erin Budesheim, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chris Napolitano, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author