Schools and neighborhoods are adolescents' primary environments, and each has a significant influence on their academic success. The majority of studies on educational attainment have examined the impact of a single context--either the school or the neighborhood--suggesting mixed findings on school and neighborhood effects as well as potential…

National data from Monitoring the Future were used to examine patterns and predictors of college attendance. Samples of American 12th-grade students from 1977 to 2003 were followed for 7 years (modal ages 18-25; N = 10,020). College attendance and graduation patterns varied considerably over historical time and based on family background.…

There is continued growth and development of outreach programs designed to increase pre-college students' awareness and understanding of engineering as a profession and as a career. These outreach programs vary in format and in the groups targeted for participation, but maintain the same fundamental goal of increasing participant knowledge of…

This study uses an ecological systems framework to examine how indicators of individual, family, and school contexts are associated with post-secondary educational enrollment among a sample of rural youth. Structural equation modeling allows us to examine both direct and indirect effects of these contexts on school enrollment. Unique elements of…

Today's students experience a great deal of pressure to succeed in school. Since predictors of academic performance are widely used to assess student capabilities, the relationship between one such test, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), and academic success are examined in this paper. The focus here is on the non-cognitive variables…

This paper presents an exploratory analysis using NLSY97 data of the relationship between the likelihood of school continuation and the choices of whether to smoke or drink. We demonstrate that in the United States as of the late 1990s, smoking in 11th-grade was a uniquely powerful predictor of whether the student finished high school, and if so…

This study examined the ability of future certainty--an individual's perception of future stability, operationalized as the likelihood of certain life outcomes--to explain variance in delinquency and school adjustment, while controlling for economic, neighborhood, and family factors, among a cross-sectional sample of 1422 male and 1562 female…