Samantha Durrance - Do Family Income and Parent Education Explain Racial Differences in Student Expectations

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


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


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


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


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.


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


APPENDIX


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


Table 4: Coding of and frequencies of father’s education level


Table 5: Coding of and frequencies of mother’s education level


Table 6: Coding of gobeyond

Table 7: Coding of stexpect, from which gobeyond was calculated

Table 8: Regression of gobeyond on race


Table 9: Regression of gobeyond on father’s education

Table 10: Regression of gobeyond on mother’s education


Table 11: Regression of gobeyond on race and father’s education


Table 12: Regression of gobeyond on race and mother’s education


Table 13: Regression of gobeyond on both parents’ education


Table 14: Regression of gobeyond on race, parent education, and family income


Table 15: 99% Confidence Intervals for Model 4

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Samantha Durrance - Do Family Income and Parent Education Explain Racial Differences in Student Expectations