Strategies for Success: High School and Beyond

The majority of American adolescents today are extraordinarily ambitious. In contrast to previous generations, more of them aspire to become physicians, lawyers, and business managers; few would consider working as machinists, office assistants, or plumbers. Not only do most teenagers hold high occupational aspirations, but they also have high educational expectations. Most adolescents expect to graduate from college, and a surprisingly significant proportion of them expect to earn graduate degrees. Such ambitions are widely held by teenagers from all different types of families and ethnicities—rich, poor, Asian, black, Hispanic, and white.1 Although highly ambitious, many of these teenagers will not fulfill their expectations, not because they are unwilling to work hard for grades or believe that school is unimportant to their future lives, but because they lack important information that would help them form effective strategies for successfully navigating their educational experiences in high school and the transition process after graduation. This is particularly the case for teenagers whose families have limited economic and social resources.2 Ambitions are an essential component of adolescents’ development, for they can help teenagers chart a life course and provide direction for how and where to invest their time and efforts. Prior research clearly demonstrates that one important predictor of social mobility is how much schooling an adolescent expects to obtain.3 Students who expect to attend college are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in postsecondary school than students with similar abilities and family background characteristics who expect to obtain only a high school diploma. Occupational aspirations are another component of ambition. When consistent with educational expectations, such aspirations demonstrate an adolescent’s knowledge of