Why Do Immigrant Students Aim High? Explaining the Aspiration–Achievement Paradox of Immigrants in Germany

Educational aspirations are generally based on past academic achievement and families’ endowment with the resources needed to reach targeted educational levels. However, although they perform worse at school and hold lower social status, previous research observes that some ethnic minorities tend to express higher educational ambitions than natives. This study discusses and tests possible reasons for this striking finding using German data from the <it>Young Immigrants in the German and Israeli Educational Systems</it> project, which includes families from Turkey and the former Soviet Union. The results reveal that Turkish students hold higher aspirations than their native counterparts, whereas no aspiration gap was found between natives and adolescents from the former Soviet Union. While German students’ aspiration patterns can mainly be ascribed to status attainment motivation, Turkish students’ high educational ambitions seem to be stimulated by a desire of status upward mobility.