Optimism trap or optimism springboard? Aspirations, educational trajectories, and early careers of youth with foreign-born parents

Young people in immigrant families have on average markedly higher educational and occupational aspirations than others, something often referred to as ‘immigrant optimism’.

This may act as a compensating force that contributes to equalization of outcomes, but concerns have also been raised about an ‘optimism trap’, where high aspirations lead to demanding routes with high risks of non-completion.

In this project, we assess whether higher aspirations are a help or a hindrance for young people with foreign-born parents.

We put economic and sociological theories on educational choice to use and build explicitly on counterfactuals: What are the potential alternative educational routes, and would young people with foreign born parents do better if they took them? To address this question we use full population register data on educational choices.

Our primary causal design is based on the exogenous variation in access to upper secondary programmes and qualification for tertiary studies provided by the 2011 upper secondary school reform.

This reform limited the access to upper secondary and tertiary educational routes for those with relatively low school performance.

With difference-in-difference methods, we study whether students with equally low grades are better of when their choices are less constrained (pre-reform) vs. more constrained (post-reform).

Importantly, we assess effects not only on upper secondary completion, but also on tertiary education and labour market outcomes.

The causal studies are supplemented with detailed descriptive and explorative studies of educational routes, using register data but also longitudinal self-reports on educational aspirations from a large representative sample of young people.

Sub-studies address aspirational adaptation, disentangle effect heterogeneity across dimensions such as origin, time in Sweden and gender, study effect accumulation over time, and differences between educational fields.The project speaks to micro-level issues of educational inequalities and macro-level issues such as supply of human capital.

We have initiated a dialogue network that will consist of students, teachers, school leaders and student career counselors, and we will have regular contacts with policy makers and other stakeholders.

This is an interdisciplinary project, engaging a sociologist and an economist and using theories from these and other fields. Capacity building is emphasized through the inclusion of a PhD project.