Social Class, Parental Encouragement, and Educational Aspirations

In this study of a randomly selected cohort of 10,318 Wisconsin high school seniors, correlational, path, and cross-tabular analyses show that socioeconomic status, intelligence, and parental encouragement all have substantial independent relationships to college plans of males as well as of females and that neither intelligence nor parental encouragement-individually or jointly-can completely account for social class differences in college plans. It substantiates, however, the claim made by other investigators using less rigorous methods and less representative samples that parental encouragement is a powerful intervening variable between socioeconomic class background and intelligence of the child and his educational aspirations. Parental encouragement appears to have its strongest effect on the college plans of males and females who score relatively high on intelligence and come from families occupying relatively high socioeconomic position. Also, ability continues to accentuate the social class differences in aspirations of both males and females regardless of parental encouragement.