Not Just Academic Achievement: The Role of School Supports in Promoting Adolescents' Future Aspirations

Introduction:  A growing body of literature demonstrates that greater future aspirations in adolescence are strongly associated with improved academic and health outcomes.  While schools have always been invested in promoting student success after high school, more recently they have become interested in explicitly measuring students’ hopes and beliefs about the future with the goal of identifying and intervening with “at-risk” youth.  However, rather than focus on individual predictors of future aspirations, this study examines the role of school climate.  Using a multi-level framework, this study examines the role of school supports such as the availability of supportive services, orderly environments for learning, and parent/school engagement in promoting adolescents’ future aspirations.

Method:  Data come from 58 high schools in 12 districts participating in a statewide project focused on measuring and improving school climate.  Data were collected from 27,758 adolescents in grades 9-12 using a web-based survey in Spring 2013.  A validated 4-item scale assessed future aspirations (α=.79).  Scales were also used to assess the availability of supportive services (α=.76), orderly environments for learning (α=.73), and parent involvement in schools (α=.74).  Demographic information about schools (e.g., size, FARMs rate) and youth (e.g., grade in school, academic grades, race, maternal education level) were also included in the models.  Two-level hierarchical linear models were conducted in HLM; all level-1 variables were tested for randomly varying slopes and grand-mean centered.  Centered interaction terms were created and tested for all school support variables with minority student status and grades.     

Results:  As expected, students who reported higher grades in school and greater academic engagement also reported more positive perceptions of their future.  Moreover, students’ perceptions of the availability of supportive services, a more orderly environment for learning, and greater parent involvement in school, were also associated with perceptions about the future (β= .02, p<.05; β= .07, p<.001; β=.03, p<.001, respectively).  Interaction terms demonstrated that school supports were particularly important for minority students and students with lower academic achievement. 

Conclusions:  These findings suggest that a possible mechanism through which schools can support students’ future aspirations is through school climate interventions; such efforts often aim to improve the conditions for learning, encourage parent involvement, and provide academic and behavioral supports.  These interventions may help students overcome existing barriers to future success and may be particularly beneficial for minority students and those with lower academic achievement.