Immigrant Perspectives on Higher Education: Aspirations, Challenges, and Opportunities
Introduction
The influence of sorting across postsecondary educational fields on children's future life chances has grown alongside educational expansion. Children of immigrant parents, who often have moderate absolute levels of education relative to native-born parents but tend to be positively selected on education relative to nonmigrants in the origin country, have a unique perspective on higher education. This article explores the views of immigrants on higher education, examining their aspirations, the challenges they face, and the opportunities that education provides.
The Immigrant Advantage: High Aspirations and Ambitious Choices
Prior research pointed to high aspirations as a key explanation of immigrant-background students' bold educational choices. Children of immigrants often exhibit higher transition rates into academic upper secondary educational tracks and postsecondary education relative to children of native-born parents with comparable socioeconomic origins. This phenomenon of high aspirations-referred to as immigrant optimism, second-generation advantage, or an immigrant drive-is central to improving our understanding of future ethnic stratification and assimilation across immigrant generations.
In Norway, children of immigrants from non-European countries have a higher likelihood of entering higher education and enrolling in high-paying fields of study compared with children of natives, despite having poorer school grades and disadvantaged family backgrounds. These findings document a persistent pattern of horizontal ethnic advantage in postsecondary education in which ambitious children of immigrants are more likely to enter into more prestigious and economically rewarding fields of study than their fellow students with native-born parents.
Several mechanisms could explain the high educational ambitions often found among immigrants' children. Immigrant parents may lack local institutional knowledge about how to succeed in the labor market and may encourage their children to choose well-known fields of study that carry high prestige in the country of origin. Immigrants and their native-born children may expect to face ethnic discrimination in the labor market, which could increase motivation to select educational fields that provide economic security and high earnings. Children who grow up in low-income immigrant families may also be more prone to focus on the material and economic benefits of education, thus gravitating toward educational fields that likely provide secure career outcomes and higher earnings.
Recent studies have argued that immigrant descendants' high educational aspirations are related to the positive selection of their immigrant parents on traits such as perseverance, health, and education relative to nonmigrants in their country of origin. Expanding on this literature, we hypothesize that children of positively selected immigrants are more likely to make ambitious choices in postsecondary education and sort into fields of study with higher economic returns than are children of natives.
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Overcoming Challenges: Language Barriers, Discrimination, and Financial Constraints
Despite their high aspirations, children of immigrants often face significant challenges in their pursuit of higher education. Because of their immigrant parents' disadvantages, such as limited language proficiency, neighborhood disparities, and ethnic discrimination, children of immigrants often face difficulties in terms of low school achievement and heightened risks of early school-leaving.
One proposed explanation emphasizes that immigrant parents anticipate ethnic discrimination and blocked opportunities for their children in blue-collar occupations and low-wage segments of the labor market where they themselves have been employed. If immigrant parents perceive the labor market for university graduates to be more meritocratic, they may encourage their children to pursue high degrees to avoid unemployment and low-paying jobs. The anticipation of discrimination and blocked opportunities may also cause immigrant parents to steer their children into study programs with more secure access to employment and better earnings prospects.
A second reason to expect high educational ambition among children of immigrants is related to immigrant parents' lack of knowledge about culture and institutions, which lowers their ability to help their children navigate the educational system. Such lack of cultural and institutional know-how may also predispose immigrants to encourage their children to select educational fields that are well known to carry prestige in most countries.
Many children of immigrants experience economic hardship and insecurity while growing up and may be more prone to emphasize so-called materialistic/survival values as opposed to self-expressive values, which include a focus on nonmonetary rewards, such as creativity and self-fulfillment. Individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds may be more focused on avoiding economic insecurity, which might prompt them to enter educational fields likely to provide personal financial gains and a secure income for their family and other close kin.
A lack of knowledge about the host country's educational system may lead children of immigrants to make (overly) ambitious choices by underestimating the requirements and demands for attaining higher degrees in prestigious fields of study. High ambition among children of low-income immigrants could be blocked by expensive tuition and living expenses at the elite universities offering more selective and advanced fields of study.
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Tuition Equity Laws and Financial Aid: Expanding Access to Higher Education
Pursuing higher education is often a pathway to higher income and overall better well-being. College graduates are less likely to rely on public benefits. Many states have adopted tuition equity laws or policies. In these states, students who meet certain criteria (like attending school in the state for a certain number of years), can pay in-state tuition regardless of their immigration status. Federal law does not prohibit states from allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates.
Providing in-state tuition rates to noncitizens increases the probability of noncitizens enrolling in college. The availability of in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities for Virginians provides a pathway to better jobs and opportunities that benefit students and the state economy.
However, more students would benefit from college if New Jersey enabled them to apply for state financial aid. They are not eligible for federal financial aid, and the average income of their parents is low. The students who benefit from these policies tend to be goal-oriented and have high academic standing. Many do not realize until they are in the process of applying to college that their immigration status will affect their ability to pursue higher education.
The Role of Education in Immigrant Integration and Social Mobility
America’s K-12 educational system has long been thought key to the ability of newly arriving immigrants to realize their dream of social mobility. The educational system, in fact, can lead to inter-generational mobility for some immigrant families and to inequality and social stratification for others.
During the nineteenth century, proponents of compulsory education believed that requiring all children to attend school would encourage social cohesion in an increasingly diverse population. These two trends have converged to produce a large and diverse cohort of newcomers that must capitalize on public education if they are to become upwardly mobile.
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Researchers continue to compare the school outcomes of the first, second, and higher generations of immigrants and the outcomes of immigrants and natives, their findings are increasingly complex and variable. Immigrant children move successfully through school and slowly up the socioeconomic ladder; instead outcomes vary widely and in sometimes unpredictable ways.
Academic success in secondary school is often the only way by which immigrant youth can attain intergenerational socioeconomic mobility. In New York, for example, children of immigrants generally outperform their peers with native-born parents on achievement tests. These patterns are evidence of an “immigrant paradox” in education-the paradox being that immigrant youth enjoy academic advantages in the relative absence of the socioeconomic advantages, such as high parental education and income, that are usually associated with school success.
Globalization, Migration, and the Quest for Educational Equity
Globalization’s new economies, technologies, and demographic changes are significant challenges for education systems the world over. Globalization stimulates increased resource consumption, leading to pollution and environmental degradation. These challenges are accelerating forced migrations and displacement, as families are compelled to leave their homes due to environmental disasters, war and terror, conflicts, and lack of economic opportunities.
The rise of the globalization regime ushered in the ascendancy of migration on a planetary scale. Global migration has generated pushback. Claims against the new immigrants have centered on job displacement, social integration, cultural assimilation, crime and national security, and the strain on public resources and services needed for new immigrants and their children. Racist animus fueled by nativistic and supremacist politicians has propagated.
As the labor migration of yesteryear begat new patterns of family reunification and as immigrants formed families in their new land, students of immigrant origin have rapidly changed the makeup of schools across many countries. Immigrant-origin children make up the fastest-growing student population: 26 percent of all children and one-third of young adults have at least one immigrant parent. Immigrants and their children are contributing to the rapid racial and ethnic diversification of the high-income countries they call home.
Children in immigrant families come with a diverse range of skills and resources, and their experiences differ significantly based on the specific combination of these resources and their contexts of reception.
The Impact of Immigration Policies on Higher Education
The executive order diminishes our nation as a beacon for freedom and opportunity. The order, now partially stayed by federal judges, may be more symbolic than effective in the long run, but the symbolism is extremely troubling, because it plays to base fears and bias against foreigners and sets us on a path to see every immigrant as a threat. In universities, we see things very differently. There are countless examples of immigrants who have come to America, attended our universities, and shared their knowledge for the benefit of all.
These capable, hard-working young people make our universities better and more vibrant places. As undergraduates, they enliven campus life and challenge their fellow students’ sometimes-provincial perspectives. They help build an understanding of the interconnected, global world all our students will share. Many of our international students stay on after graduation to work in our universities and in industry. They launch start-ups that generate investment returns, bring inventions to market, and create jobs. Others go back to their home countries and become leaders there. They leave us with enduring friendships and an understanding of America that will pave the way for smoother international relations.
The United States must offer international students a heartfelt, unequivocal welcome - backed up by consistent and thoughtful immigration policies based on American values of fairness and objectivity. Segregating international students and immigrants on the basis of religion or nationality sends the message to the world that the United States is not the land of freedom and opportunity that we value, but a place of bias and suspicion.
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