Immigrant Generational Status, Occupational Plans, and Postsecondary Education in the United States

Stephen L. Morgan, Cornell University
Dafna Gelbgiser, Cornell University

Framed by alternative models of immigrant assimilation and conjectures about the familism of Hispanic adolescents and young adults, we offer models of high school completion and postsecondary education for a recent cohort of students. With careful attention to alternative measures of race-ethnicity and immigrant generational status, we utilize a unique measure of the qualitative differences embedded in verbatim occupational plans that are typically collapsed into coarse categories by data contractors. With a version of the finely differentiated measures developed for a larger project (see Morgan, Gelbgiser, and Weeden 2013; Morgan, Leenman, Todd, and Weeden 2013a, b), we first assess the extent to which specific occupational plans, as well as beliefs about the educational requirements of the jobs listed in those plans, differ by both self-identified race and immigrant generational status. Then, we consider how differences in these finely differentiated beliefs predict high school completion and subsequent patterns of postsecondary education.