When immigrants are aiming high: Educational achievement and attainment in light of greater aspirations

Despite immigrants oftentimes portraying exceptionally high educational aspirations, they and their descendants tend to show lower educational outcomes compared to their majority population counterparts (also termed the aspiration-achievement paradox). The primary aim of this project is to investigate the question how high educational aspirations found among immigrant families shape ethnic inequalities throughout educational careers, both in terms of educational achievement and educational transitions. While current research suggests that immigrants transition more frequently to the more demanding tracks given high aspirations and holding constant prior achievement and social origin, there is far less research on the relationship between educational aspirations and educational achievement. Overall, we identified a number of key research gaps which we seek to address in this project: (1) we use high-quality data to provide longitudinal evidence for the relation between educational aspirations and ethnic differences in transitional behavior and educational achievement for the German context, (2) we apply theoretical models of educational decisions and learning investments to integrate disparate conceptu