The interest in educational and professional aspirations of students transiting to post-secondary education has gained prominence in academic debates and policy agendas internationally. Political interventions for raising aspirations quite often draw on narrow instrumental and rationalistic assumptions of individual decision-making that, as we…

Conventional wisdom suggests that parents' educational expectations (how far they expect their children to go) and aspirations (how far they want their children to go) positively impact academic outcomes and benefits from attending high-ability schools. However, here we juxtapose the following: largely positive effects of educational expectations…

In this article, we explore a program designed to engage high school and college students with learning disabilities (LD) in conversations about their hopes, expectations, and fears for the future. We explore the mindset of students by focusing on their self-identified passions for life and sense of strengths and limitations. We found that males…

This paper focuses on aspirations to study abroad, using the case of Vietnamese international students (VISs) in Japan. A qualitative research study based on 23 in-depth interviews applied the 'aspirations-capabilities' framework (de Haas, 2021) and revealed that while economic factors play a significant role in motivating Vietnamese students to…

High school counsellors serve as role models and mentors for students as they negotiate academic challenges, develop future career and educational plans, and explore their identities. Though research exists on the gendered experiences of high school administrators, there is a dearth of scholarship on school counsellors. To provide a framework for…

Recent research has increasingly been studying the long-lasting effects of secondary education structures and processes on higher education (HE) outcomes. While the influence of socioeconomic composition on higher education enrolment is established, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We posit that the composition effect partially runs…

Famous people can positively influence young people by serving as examples of how to be a good person, but very little is known about which famous people youth look up to and why they do so. We coded and analyzed open-response data from 596 adolescents (M[subscript age] = 14.09 years; 58.5% girls, 57.5% White) in the northeastern United States to…

Multivariate count data is ubiquitous in many areas of research including the physical, biological, and social sciences. These data are traditionally modeled with the Dirichlet Multinomial distribution (DM). A new, more flexible Dirichlet-Tree Multinomial (DTM) model is gaining in popularity. Here, we consider Bayesian DTM regression models. Our…

The relationship between family science capital and students' science career intentions has been widely discussed since the ASPIRES project initially proposed this linkage. Since science capital is more likely to be clustered in some social groups, the linkage between family science capital and their children's science aspirations may exacerbate…

Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews with Black immigrant and second-generation boys at Bridgewood secondary school in New York City, this article points out how the high educational aspirations expressed by Black African and Caribbean boys are strategically deployed as features of an ethnic project to counter anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-Black…

In the 2020-2021 pro-democracy protests in Thailand, an unprecedented number of high school students participated on all levels: from organizing rallies to small symbolic actions. To better understand this phenomenon, we engaged 691 Thai students from diverse backgrounds to write a letter to a recipient on the other side of the political divide.…

Out-of-school mathematics programs (OSMPs) can be a great benefit for students in STEM. However, little is known about how students perceive the support provided to them by such programs, especially with respect to students of color. In this paper, we draw upon a framework of institutional resource types (Nasir & Cooks, 2009) and performed a…

Using data from the 2015 "Dane County Youth Assessment" (n = 12,886 students, 22 high schools), we identified disparities between students with Individualized Education Programs (IEP) and without IEPs across multiple post-high school aspirations. We identified significant IEP status × grades earned interactions in predicting students'…

This paper tells a story of Israeli male high schoolers who spend their adolescent years preparing for service in elite military units in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). They dream of serving in special units and begin training at 15 or 16 years old. After years of taxing preparations, at the age of 17 they arrive at the grueling military exams.…

This study utilizes ethnographic methods, in-depth interviews, and observations to investigate the neighborhood and high school experiences of Terry, an academically and athletically high-achiever. Originating from a multiple case study methodology that examined the experiences, perceptions, and aspirations of Black male students who played high…