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Research finds that youths who are able to align their educational and occupational ambitions are better able to realize both; and families, peers, and schools can play important roles in this process. In this paper, we explore how youths align their future ambitions, adding to this work in two important ways. First, we consider not only the alignment of educational and occupational ambitions, but also how youths' family plans intersect with these. Second, we explore the alignment of ambitions among a group of youths who may be considered socially marginalized, those who have grown up in public housing. We use qualitative data from the Gautreaux Two Program in Chicago, which gave families in existing public housing vouchers to move to more advantaged areas. Our sample includes in-depth qualitative interviews with 93 children included in the study. Our results show that there are two groups of youths - one group whose ambitions are aligned, and one whose ambitions are misaligned. The narratives of the youths whose ambitions are at odds reflect the ways in which competing ideologies of success for inner-city children can lead to misaligned aspirations, and both groups of youths discuss the difficulties they face in realizing their ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research contributes to discussions about social inequality in school choices in two ways. First, educational choices include the multitude of options families may consider including choosing a home in a particular area and home-schooling, and not at a single point in time, but over children's education careers. Second, this research explores school choices across school district boundaries to include school choices in suburban and rural districts, as well as urban districts. I use unique data from a representative sample of 390 families with school-aged children living in Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Metropolitan area to explore the options that families consider for their children's schooling. The data paint a picture of two groups: one, white, suburban, and middle-income, that primarily selects schools through residences and another, non-white, lower-income, and urban, that relies more on non-neighborhood school options. The differences in the types of options these two groups consider suggests that the expanded school choice policies of urban school districts will have little influence on overall school inequality because the option to choose neighborhood public schools through residences remains prevalent among advantaged suburban whites. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores variation in the link between occupational goals and educational plans across social background. Analyses of three cohorts of tenth-graders show that occupational expectations are more loosely related to educational expectations among students whose parents have some college experience than among students whose parents have no college experience. The varying influence of specific occupational goals on post-secondary education across social background is important because less advantaged students who do not plan to hold careers with high educational requirements exclude themselves from college more so than do those students with more advantaged social backgrounds, limiting their occupational mobility. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists concerned with inequalities in education often puzzle over the mismatch between the educational expectations and college attendance of students with low socioeconomic status (SES). While researchers have explored many of the obstacles to college enrollment that low-SES students face, few have attempted to capture a concept that social reproduction theorists like Bourdieu propose is central to class reproduction: that perceptions of opportunities and the means to achieve goals differ according to socioeconomic background. I explore the concept of certainty of college attendance as a rough and imperfect operationalization of this concept. Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), I show that variation in certainty is related to socioeconomic status, with higher SES students being more certain of their chances of attending college than those with lower SES. Using multinomial logistic regression models, I show that certainty about college accounts for some, but not all, of the gap in college attendance by SES among those who expect to attend college. Finally, I find that proficiency test scores, significant others? influences and friends? values, and a student?s occupational expectations and career values can account for a large portion of the variation in certainty about college attendance by SES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private education is the fastest-growing sector of post-secondary education in Asia and worldwide. This growth is especially notable in developing countries with a long history of state-controlled, public education. Vietnam has had a strong public, post-secondary education sector that has only recently begun to experience growth in non-public institutions. In this research, I investigate how the growth of the private sector may influence stratification in Vietnam. I find that private and other types of non-public institutions are more likely to serve more advantaged students from South Vietnam. They pay higher costs to acquire their post-secondary credentials; however, these students also seem to choose more lucrative fields like science, technology and engineering, and business, perhaps as a way to ensure good returns to this investment. This research suggests that as the private sector in Vietnam expands, the influence of family background and region of residence on post-secondary attendance may grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]