Educational Expectations of Immigrant Students: Does Tracking Matter?

Abstract

Immigrants are known to have high expectations to matriculate into college and achieve a college degree. Yet the majority of the studies that examine the educational expectations of immigrant youth focus only on one country. Furthermore, researchers have not yet examined whether the high educational expectations of immigrants are promoted or hampered by the characteristics of educational systems in immigrants’ host countries. This paper examines the relationship between one such feature, tracking, and the educational expectations of immigrant youth in Europe. It shows that cross-nationally, immigrant students have higher educational expectations than nonimmigrant youth. However, for first-generation immigrants, this advantage is not as pronounced in tracked systems as compared with nontracked systems. This suggests that immigrants and nonimmigrants respond differently to the educational contexts that they encounter and that certain features of educational systems can stymie immigrant advancement.