Do aspirations during upper school influence university enrollment of immigrants’ children?

Educational aspirations play a central role in determining students’ possible educational trajectories. A few scholarly researches have explored the comparison between aspirations and achievements due to the longitudinal nature of the information required. This contribution aims to fill this gap by using record linkage techniques and proposes to measure the role of students’ educational aspirations during their upper school attendance in achieving their (subsequent) actual university attendance in Italy. First, the information from the 2015 ISTAT survey on “Integration of Second Generations (ISG)” were used to describe upper school students’ educational aspirations by citizenship. Second, the record linkage of ISG dataset with the administrative data on university students, from the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR), makes possible to analyse the role of individual aspirations on actual achievement in terms of university attendance. Results showed that the aspiration to pursue tertiary education positively impact on the final decision to attend tertiary education. However, the percentage of foreign students, who have post-upper school aspiration toward tertiary education and subsequently actually university attendance, is significantly lower than the same percentage for Italians. The results associated to the age at arrival do not indicate a definite trend when considering the aspiration to go to university. Conversely, when considering the likelihood of students’ university attendance, the older the student is on arrival, the lower the probability of enrolling in university.