Adapting to Family Setbacks: Malleability of Students' and Parents' Educational Expectations

Ambitions that students and their parents set during their adolescence have significance across the life course. It is yet unclear, however, how these expectations respond to changing family circumstances. In this work, we examine how negative family economic shocks affect educational expectations for students and their parents by using two theoretical perspectives - status attainment and adopt-adapt models. Further, we move beyond these debates about the malleability of expectations by considering how this malleability might differ by your place in the social structure. We thus make hypotheses about how social class may buffer or amplify the effect of negative family economic shocks on educational expectations. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we expand our conceptualization of educational expectations beyond degree expectations to include educational institutional route expectations - the educational pathway that students plan to take to achieve their degree expectations. We find that degree expectations are only somewhat malleable, but that route expectations are malleable. Family economic shocks served to reduce students' and parents' expectations for beginning their post-secondary education at a B.A.-granting institution. Further, we find support for the amplification hypothesis rather than the buffering hypothesis; the expectations of middle-class students and parents prove more negatively responsive to family economic shocks than do those of their lower SES counterparts. This work has implications for examining the dynamic nature of the status attainment process and suggests that expanding educational expectations to include institutional route may be vital for understanding social mobility in the current educational climate.