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, and 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.
