EDUCATIONAL ASPIRATIONS OF MINORITY YOUTH

Using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88),we a nalyze how educational aspirations are formed and maintained from eigh th to twelfth grades among a single cohort of youth. Guided by researc h in the status-attainment literature, which focuses on how aspiration s are shaped, and the blocked-opportunities framework, which considers the structural obstacles that bound or level aspirations, we find tha t the relative shares of minority youth who have high educational aspi rations are high from eighth to twelfth grades. However, ethnic groups differ in the extent to which high educational aspirations are mainta ined such that black and Hispanic youth have less stable aspirations. Our results suggest that family socioeconomic status (SES) not only co ntributes to ambitious aspirations in eighth grade but, more important , to the maintenance of high aspirations throughout the high school ye ars. Because black and Hispanic students are less likely to maintain t heir high aspirations throughout high school, owing to their lower fam ily SES background, we argue that their early aspirations are less con crete than those of white and especially Asian students. Focus-group d iscussions with adolescents support quantitative findings that, compar ed to whites and Asians, black and Hispanic youth are relatively uninf ormed about college, thus dampening their odds of reaching their educa tional goals.