School Racial Composition and Student Educational Aspirations: A Question of Equity in a Multiracial Society

This article uses survey data on 15,800 high school students from 3 urban school districts to investigate the impact of school-level support for higher educational attainment and school racial composition on students' actual educational aspirations. We examine students' perceptions of school support for postsecondary participation and test alternative measures of school racial composition in order to account for the increasingly multiracial makeup of today's urban high schools. We include both school-level and student-level characteristics in a multilevel logistic regression model to see if perceived school support for higher educational attainment differs by school racial composition. The results provide support for the hypothesis that school racial composition and school support have an effect on students' reported educational aspirations, and that alternative specifications of school racial composition provide different interpretations of these important relationships.