| Manyee Wong
Northwestern University
A longitudinal study of the educational attainment process: Examining the effects of environmental and social stressors on students' educational trajectory
FINAL REPORT
This paper examines how exposure to risk events can shock students off their educational path via changes in college aspirations, school effort and test scores. Of particular interest is whether students recover from these shocks and return to their expected educational trajectory. Using NELS:88 panel data, results show that student exposure to certain risk events may correlate with either a positive or negative change in students' college aspirations. These changes can have a domino effect on changes in subsequent school behavior but the rippling effect is not large enough to significantly increase a student's risk of dropping out. We find that change in college aspirations is the only behavior that has a direct effect on students' risk of dropping out. Risk events related to sibling influence correlate most negatively with students' aspirations which significantly increase one's risk of dropping out. Experience with increasing health or economic risks (i.e., being of welfare) seem to generate a rise in college aspirations but increasing number of social stressors consistently affect students negatively across the range of educational outcomes. In general, students with greater number of risks regardless of type show greater instability in aspirations and test scores and decreases in effort. Results indicate that risk events generally have greater effect on students' aspirations during their early adolescent years and greater effect on students' test scores during their later adolescent years. Finally, results show that changes in college aspirations, effort, and test scores can be persistent but with the exception of test scores, students do partially recover rather quickly from the change.
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