Chapter 11: Social Capital and Educational Expectations: Exploring Adolescents’ Capabilities to Aspire for Postsecondary Education

The study of educational expectation has long received attention in the sociology of education (Goyette & Xie, 1999; Hauser & Anderson, 1991; Hossler & Stage, 1992; Kao & Tienda, 1998). Educational expectation refers to a combination of intentions, purposes and plans which an individual expects to achieve at a particular stage of education (Feliciano, 2006; Goyette, 2008). Different from educational aspiration, educational expectation provides more realistic evaluations of personal abilities, financial resources and opportunities for future educational outcomes (Andres, Anisef, Krahn, Looker, & Thiessen, 1999; Feliciano, 2006; Hanson, 1994). The formation of educational expectation, in this view, more realistically reflects an estimation of how far an individual intends to pursue future study (Morgan, 2006).