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Educational expectations have increased over time, with greater increases among young women than men, yet research focused on expectations for post-baccalaureate degrees is limited. We investigate young men's and women's plans to attend graduate or professional school using Monitoring the Future data from 12th graders for 1976 to 2019, focusing on how academic performance and work and family values may be associated with post-baccalaureate expectations. We find that young women's expectations for graduate or professional school began to exceed young men's in the early 1990s and continued to do so afterward, although expectations for post-baccalaureate schooling declined some in recent years, especially among young men. Results also indicate that the gender gap over time is driven partially by more young women than men with B or lower average grades holding post-baccalaureate expectations. Work values may foster these high expectations, especially for lower-achieving young women. Finally, we examine whether post-baccalaureate expectations translate into higher attainments, and results suggest that higher-achieving students are better positioned to meet their post-baccalaureate expectations. Collectively, our findings suggest that sociocultural factors promoting women's participation in the public sphere may encourage some young women to form high-level expectations that they are not academically equipped to meet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa, a country that is highly stratified by race, is an important location for studying the relationship between race and educational expectations. Using a longitudinal data set, we examine the educational expectations of black (African), colored (mixed race), and white (European ancestry) parents and children in Cape Town, South Africa. We find that parents and children have high educational expectations regardless of race, but black parents and children have higher educational expectations than coloreds and whites once socioeconomic and other factors are controlled. We also find that parents' and children's expectations tend to agree more and are more closely correlated among coloreds and whites than blacks. We test two explanations for the educational expectations of parents and children, finding more support for the status attainment perspective among coloreds and whites than blacks and support for the family social capital perspective among blacks and coloreds only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, relatively little is known about the prosocial values of adolescents. Research has shown that females attach more importance to certain prosocial values than males do in late adolescence but has not considered whether this gender difference is evident across stages of adolescence and whether it varies by race. We examine values that focus on doing things for others, using data from a nationwide survey of 12- to 17-year-olds. We find that girls place more importance on these prosocial values than boys at younger ages. However, we also find important patterns in this gender difference across racial groups as well as across age. White boys appear to attach less importance to prosocial values than other race and gender groups. Furthermore, the gender gap in prosocial values is larger at older ages, with older adolescent boys placing less importance on prosocial values than younger ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on the relationship between adolescent childbearing and later life outcomes is deficient in two respects. First, it has focused almost exclusively on socioeconomic outcomes, failing to consider the possible effect of a birth on social psychological outcomes. Second, it generally has not considered whether the relationship between adolescent childbearing and outcomes has changed across cohorts and over time. This study attempts to fill these two gaps by estimating and comparing the effects of non-marital childbearing on change in a social psychological variable, educational expectations, over the period between the sophomore year in high school and two years later, using longitudinal data for the sophomore cohorts of High School and Beyond, 1980, and the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. Findings for both cohorts indicate that adolescent girls tend to reduce their educational expectations following a nonmarital pregnancy or birth. In addition, adolescent girls with low educational expectations are at greater risk of a nonmarital pregnancy or birth than adolescent girls with high educational expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]