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Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Do Family Income and Parent Education Explain Racial Differences in Student Expectations?
Recent data on high school graduation rates in America show that black, Hispanic, and Native
American students continue to lag behind their white and Asian/Pacific Islander peers (National Center
for Education Statistics, 2015). While the average graduation rate for all students across the nation is
81%, with white and API students averaging 85% and 93%, respectively, the average graduation rate for
Hispanic students is only 76%. The rates for black and Native American students are even lower—a mere
68% of students in each group graduated in the 2011-2012 school year within four years of entering high
school.
Debate over the reasons for this race gap continues, with some blaming testing bias and
differences in teachers’ treatment of students, others turning to de facto segregation in schools and
differences in school quality, and yet others pointing to family and individual factors such as culture and
the desire to learn. The simplest answer is that all of these factors and more play some role in the
achievement gap between races—but some factors play a more prominent role than others. This report
seeks to determine the extent to which parent education and family income are mechanisms through
which race affects 10th grade students’ expectations for their educational achievement.
I expect to find that students’ educational expectations will mirror graduation rates: white and
Asian students will be more likely to expect to continue their education beyond high school than black,
Hispanic, or Native American students. However, I believe that much of this apparent racial disparity can
be attributed to differences in the educational attainment of the students’ parents and family income.
As income is positively correlated with education, those parents who are more educated will tend to
have higher family incomes (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). Parents with more education set a
precedent for their children and have higher expectations for their children’s education, which transfer
in part to the children’s own expectations (Davis-Kean, 2005). Parents with higher incomes also tend to
have higher expectations for their children’s education, and these expectations are associated with the
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
child’s grades and eventual educational outcomes (Child Trends Databank, 2012). Children from families
with more financial means may also be more likely to consider higher education than their low-income
peers, since they are more likely to be able to pay the tuition and other costs associated with post-
secondary education.
The dataset used for this analysis is the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) of 2002, collected by
the United States Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics using five separate
questionnaires, two achievement tests, and a school observation form. Participants were 15,362 tenth
grade students in 752 public and private high schools during the spring of 2002. The dependent variable
in this analysis is adapted from a variable in the original dataset that asked respondents, “As things
stand now, how far in school do you think you will get?” and provided options ranging from less than
high school graduation to obtaining a PhD, MD, or other advanced degree. The new variable is coded
100 for the 91.9 percent of respondents who reported that they expected to go beyond high school in
their education and zero for the 8.1 percent of respondents who did not expect to graduate from high
school or expected to obtain only a high school diploma or GED. It is unknown at the time of this analysis
whether survey respondents adhered to their expectations for graduating from high school and pursuing
higher education, but those who in 10th grade already expected that they would not continue their
education beyond high school are almost certainly less likely to have done so than their peers with
higher expectations.
The dummy independent variables for race consist of black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander
(referred to as API), Native American/Alaska Native (referred to as Native American), and multiracial
groups, with white as the reference group. Each variable is coded 1 for respondents who identified as
belonging to that group in the survey. While researchers separated Hispanic respondents into two
values depending on whether or not they identified a race in addition to their Hispanic ethnicity, my
variable for Hispanic includes those respondents who belonged to either Hispanic group in the original
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
variable. The dummy control variables for parent education are divided into six ranges for each
parent/guardian, with a PhD or other professional degree as the reference group. The control variable
for income in this analysis divides the 13 income values of the original dataset into five dummy
variables, with those families earning $100,001 or more as the reference group. Since a higher level of
education tends to result in a higher income, parent education is antecedent to family income. Thus, I
will first control for a parent education levels and then add controls for family income.
An initial regression indicates that the tendencies observed in high school graduation rates are
similar to the tendencies observed in the dataset. Asian students are 2.7 percentage points more likely
to expect to continue their education beyond high school than white students, while every other group
in the model is less likely than whites to expect to do so. The gap between the probabilities of a white
respondent and a respondent from another racial or ethnic group from the sample expecting to
continue their education beyond high school is 3.0 percentage points for black students, 5.4 percentage
points for Hispanic students, 4.6 percentage points for Native American students, and 1.3 percentage
points for multiracial students, and these differences are statistically significant for black, Hispanic, and
API students. Though there is no statistically significant difference between white and Native American
or white and multiracial students, it is possible that a sample with larger proportions of these students
would produce statistically significant values. While national high school graduation rates show that
African American and Native American students graduate at about the same rate and lag the furthest
behind white students, where expectations are concerned, Hispanic respondents in the sample lag the
furthest behind their white peers.
Controlling for respondents’ parents’ levels of education results in regression coefficients that
demonstrate no statistically significant difference between white students and any other racial group
except API students. A respondent’s father’s level of education has a slightly greater effect on the
respondent’s educational expectations than that person’s mother’s level of education. Together, parent
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
education reduces the difference between white and black respondents’ likelihoods of expecting to
pursue education beyond high school from 3.0 percentage points to 1.3 percentage points in favor of
whites, a difference of 56.7 percent. We also observe reductions in the expectations gap of an even
greater 75.9 percent for Hispanics, 37.0 percent for Native American respondents, and 15.4 percent for
those in the multiracial group. API respondents both in the sample and in the population demonstrate
even higher educational expectations than white students despite being more likely to have parents
with lower levels of education, indicating that other factors are causing this difference.
As expected, controlling for both family income and parent education explains the largest
portion of the relationship between race and students’ expectations that they will pursue education
beyond high school for almost every racial group. Black students in the sample are only 0.3 percentage
points less likely than white students whose families have similar incomes and whose parents have
similar levels of education to say that they expect to continue their education beyond the high school
level, a 90% reduction in the gap initially observed between black and white students. Hispanic students
are only 0.7 percentage points less likely to say so after controlling for income and parent education,
which means that these variables explain 87.0 percent of the 5.4 percentage point difference observed
between white and Hispanic students’ expectations in the initial regression. Native American students
are still 2.1 percentage points less likely to expect to continue their education than white respondents of
the same income levels and parent education levels, but this is less than half of the initial gap observed,
and the confidence interval indicates that it is possible there is no difference between similar white and
Native American students in the population. API students of the same income and parent education
levels as their white peers have an even greater lead of 4.6 percentage points in the probability that
they will expect to continue their education beyond high school than seen before introducing control
variables; thus, there are factors other than both parent education and income that cause Asian and
Pacific Islander students to be more likely to have these expectations. Finally, multiracial students in the
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
sample are only 0.7 percentage points less likely than their white peers of the same family income and
parent education levels to expect to continue their education beyond high school. For each racial group
except the API group, there is no statistically significant difference between white students and their
non-white peers in the population when family income and parent education are held constant, even at
the 99% confidence level.
Differences in parent education levels and family income account for a large portion of the racial
disparities between respondents’ expectations for pursuing education beyond high school for black and
Hispanic students in both the sample and the population as a whole, as well as for Native
American/Pacific Islander and multiracial students in the sample. However, other factors that were not
included in my models are likely causing Asian/Pacific Islander students’ advantage in self-reported
expectations for continuing their education as compared to their white peers, and I cannot draw any
conclusions about the differences between white and Native American or white and multiracial students
in the population. For black and Hispanic students, at least, this analysis indicates that public policy
initiatives that promote income equality and provide feasible opportunities for higher education may be
effective in the long term at reducing the disadvantageous racial gap in high school graduation rates
between white students and their non-white peers by putting current students in a better position as
parents. In the short term, policy initiatives that teach students about the opportunities for and benefits
of pursuing education beyond high school may help counteract some of the negative effects caused by
coming from a low-income family and not having a family history of post-secondary educational
achievement.
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
REFERENCES
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2015, April 2). Earnings and unemployment rates by educational attainment.
Retrieved from Employment Projections: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
Child Trends Databank. (2012). Parental expectations for their children's academic attainment. Retrieved
from http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=parental-expectations-for-their-childrens-
academic-attainment#sthash.IZJRqaRG.dpuf
Davis-Kean, P. E. (2005, June). The Influence of Parent Education and Family Income on Child
Achievement: The Indirect Role of Parental Expectations and the Home Environment. Journal of
Family Psychology, 19(2), 294-304. doi:10.1037/0893-3200.19.2.294
National Center for Education Statistics. (2015, May). Public High School Graduation Rates. Retrieved
from The Condition of Education: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
APPENDIX
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 2: Coding of dummy variables for racial groups
Table 3: Coding and frequencies of the variables for income
Original Race Coding New Race Coding
Value Label Frequency Value Label Frequency
1 Amer. Indian/Alaska Native, non-Hispanic 131 1 Amer. Indian/Alaska Native 131
2 Asian, Hawaii/Pac. Islander, non-Hispanic 1465 1 Asian, Hawaii/Pac. Islander 1465
3 Black or African American, non-Hispanic 2033 1 Black or African American 2033
4 Hispanic, no race specified 1001 1 Hispanic 2234
5 Hispanic, race specified 1233
6 Multiracial, non-Hispanic 742 1 Multiracial 742
7 White, non-Hispanic 8757 1 White 8757
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 4: Coding of and frequencies of father’s education level
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 5: Coding of and frequencies of mother’s education level
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 6: Coding of gobeyond
Table 7: Coding of stexpect, from which gobeyond was calculated
Table 8: Regression of gobeyond on race
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 9: Regression of gobeyond on father’s education
Table 10: Regression of gobeyond on mother’s education
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 11: Regression of gobeyond on race and father’s education
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 12: Regression of gobeyond on race and mother’s education
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 13: Regression of gobeyond on both parents’ education
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 14: Regression of gobeyond on race, parent education, and family income
Samantha Durrance Final Paper PMAP 8131 Summer 2015
Table 15: 99% Confidence Intervals for Model 4