Social Inequality in Student Expectations and Higher Education Enrollment - A Comparison between the United States and Germany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine the link between student expectations and educational attainment. While a close link between expectations and final educational attainment is assumed in thestatus attainment literature, a growing body of US literature has claimed that expectations have become increasingly unrealistic and decoupled from actual outcomes. However, this claim has rarely been investigated longitudinally on the individual level or beyond the context of the United States. We investigate the relationship for two educational systems with different institutional configurations: The United States and Germany. For Germany, we use data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS, Starting Cohort 4). For the US, we rely on data from the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS, 2009). We find that the level of expectations is overall much higher in the US; however, we also find that the gap between SES groups is larger in the US. Furthermore, we find that the students in these two countries do not differ much in terms of the probability that they will realize their expectations. Additionally, the SES gradient of realization is fairly similar across the different institutional contexts. Finally, we also find that expectations do mediate a substantial part of the effect of SES on higher
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".