High School Students' Experiences of Classism and Postsecondary Educational Aspirations and Expectations

Education-related aspirations and expectations are strong predictors of postsecondary educational attainment, including college enrollment. A number of variables influence aspirations and expectations; chief among these is a young person’s social class background. While scholars historically have focused on class-related structural barriers inhibiting the development of college-going aspirations and expectations, a more recent body of research has argued that the structural conditions related to an individual’s class background must be tied to the ways in which social class is subjectively experienced and internalized, thereby influencing perceptions about opportunities and subsequent aspirations and expectations about the future. Social class-based discrimination, or classism, is one critical vehicle through which class is subjectively experienced. Although classism predicts a number of negative psychological and school-related outcomes, no research so far has considered the influence of classism on aspirations (Thompson & Subich, 2013). This study employed hierarchical multiple regression analyses to examine the relative contribution of three subdomains of classism (i.e., citational, institutionalized and interpersonal classism through discounting), measured by the Classism Experiences Questionnaire-High School (CEQ-HS; Langhout, Rosselli, & Feinstein, as adapted by Shellman, 2014), to variance in 300 10th graders self-reported educational aspirations and expectations. Data were drawn from a previous study, in which the CEQ-HS was adapted and validated among a sample of public high school students. Additionally, the mediating function of classism on the relations between students’ class background and aspirations and expectations was examined, utilizing Preacher and Hayes’s (2008) approach for evaluating and comparing indirect effects in mediation models. Results revealed that greater endorsement of experiences of citational classism significantly predicted a decrease in aspirations among the participants sampled, after controlling for social class background, grade point average (GPA), and academic curriculum track. Further, social class background had an indirect effect on aspirations through experiences of citational classism, after controlling for GPA and curriculum track, although this mediating effect appeared to degrade in subsequent tests of simple mediation. No significant findings were demonstrated related to the other domains of classism or the role of classism in predicting educational expectations. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed, with a focus on key directions for future research in this domain.Educational Psychology, Department o