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The papers in this issue examine various aspects of ethnic differences in higher education. The first three papers, all of which focus on Britain, attempt to explain the very high motivation behind enrollment in higher and further education by ethnic minority students. These papers argue that investment in higher education is a defiance strategy that is used by ethnic minorities to counterbalance the effect of ethnic penalties. It seems that aspirations are still significant in shaping the educational attainment and are fuelled by the grim structural barriers facing ethnic minorities. The anticipation of labour market discrimination on the one hand, and the belief in the value of education as the main means for social mobility on the other hand, lead ethnic minorities in Britain to over-invest in education. The fourth paper tells a different story, in that immigrant students experience systematic disadvantages throughout their school careers including a much lower enrollment in higher education. These young immigrants hold more negative perceptions towards the value of education, not only in comparison with their Italian counterparts, but it seems also in comparisons with minority young people in Britain. However, in the last paper, the results resemble the British case, in that the second generation students hold higher academic expectations than their non-immigrant origin peers, and that these higher expectations are associated with higher levels of persistence and attainment. The authors here highlight the importance of the theory of immigrant optimism in explaining the between-groups differences. However, this theory does not seem to have strong explanatory power in the Italian case, if anything, perhaps ‘immigrant pessimism’ is a better theory to explain the low aspirations for higher education and poor educational attainment among immigrants in Italy. Of course, further evidence is required to substantiate this claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the century, young people’s aspirations have featured prominently in UK education policy and practice. Governments of all sides have espoused a rhetoric and enacted initiatives which have tended to focus on somehow ‘correcting’ the aspirations of students of working-class and minority ethnic origins. This paper applies a Bourdieusian framework to the analysis of the education and career aspirations of British-born young women of Bangladeshi heritage in higher education. In doing so, it advances a theoretically informed understanding of aspirations, which accounts for the multiple factors that contribute to shape them as well as for the relative implications in terms of future pathways. Drawing on interviews with 21 female undergraduate students, and building on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and capital, I conceptualise aspirations as an aspect of habitus. I argue that this conceptualisation allows light to be shed on the ways in which multiple, intersecting dimensions of social identity and social structures play out in the shaping, re-shaping and possibly fading of aspirations. Additionally, it enables us to examine the mutually informing influences of aspirations and capital on practice. Findings indicate that the valuing of education and social mobility expressed by those of Bangladeshi and other minority ethnic origins are integral to collective constructions of ‘what people like us do’, which are grounded in diasporic discourses. They also illuminate the significance of social and cultural capital for young people’s capacity to aspire and actualise aspirations, as these contribute to delineate their ‘horizons for action’. This suggests that by failing to adequately recognise how structural inequalities inform differential access to valued capital, prevailing policy and practitioners’ approaches attribute excessive responsibility to students and their parents. The notion of ‘known routes’ is in this respect put forward as a way to make sense of aspirations, expectations and pathways, and the role of institutions in forging possible futures is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing evidence that shows that social context is becoming less significant in influencing educational achievements and expectations. Additionally, evidence indicates that expectations are high across the board and becoming of declining significance to educational achievement. In light of this, we reexamine and offer an alternative to the renowned linear models connecting background variables to scholarly achievement via pupils' educational expectation. Analysis of GCSE scores, using three consecutive waves of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, reveals that the verity of this classical claim is dependent on occupational class, ethnic origin, and school socio-economic status level. These results thus confirm an unrecognized effect of family and school background variables on achievement—not only to engender expectations but also to moderate their influence. This recognition expands and deepens understanding of inequality in educational achievement and social mobility by treating expectations as a resource and analytically distinguishing between the ability of a social group or a certain school to attain or create high expectations and their ability to capitalize on it and translate these into achievements. We find that in many cases, expectations still possess strong potential to transform into achievement, while in others they are high across the board and rather inconsequential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are now a growing number of studies on intermarriage in Western multi-ethnic societies, especially in countries with post-colonial migrants (and their descendants). Intermarriage is of great interest to analysts because a group’s tendency to partner across ethnic boundaries is a key indicator of the social distance between groups in a multi-ethnic society. However, theorizing on intermarriage is typically premised upon the union (usually) of a White and non-White individual. We know little, therefore, about what happens the next generation down: the unions of multiracial people, who are the children of intermarried couples. With whom do multiracial people partner? Furthermore, are multiracial individuals who are partnered with White people different in their outlooks, identifications, and socialization of their children, from those who have ethnic minority partners? I draw upon some findings from a Leverhulme-funded research project on multiracial people and their experiences as parents in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]