What Is the Relationship Between Public, Catholic or Other Private School Attendance and College Expectation?

Question: What is the relationship between public, Catholic or other private school attendance and college expectation?

There is often much discrepancy that arises between students from public schools, Catholic schools, and private schools. There are many factors that go into whether or not a child will succeed and eventually get in and attend college. These include such things as the quality of the school, the economic status of the school districts that they are located in and the level of support that is given to each of the students. The aim of this paper is to distinguish between the expectations for college attendance across students from public, Catholic and private schools. How the students themselves view their future is an important factor determining how far children will go academically. The students' expectations that they set for themselves are influential in how well they will actually perform and thus whether or not they will make it to college. The three different school types discussed in this paper all take various approaches to how they prepare their students for college thus seeing what the students' themselves expect as the outcome will be interesting.

Previous research has studied issues such as the differences between Catholic, public and private education as well as different outcomes associated with each schools. In one study done by Reynolds and Pemberton, college expectations were studied for groups of 15 and 16 year olds. "Educational expectations are an important cognitive link between educational aspirations and eventual achievements." This study examined the ideas of students on potential future outcomes. Of the sample, the boys thought that they had a "greater than 75% chance of completing a college degree by age 30." This research has found that the educational plans among youth have been on a rise. This study was useful because it provided good evidence on what student's believe they will be able to do in the future. The limitations of this study are that it only studied boys. It also did not distinguish what type of school the students went to. Morrison and Hodgkin's studied the effectiveness of Catholic education in comparison to that of public education. In this study, the effectiveness of Catholic education was measured by the percentage of students from Catholic and Public school students who went to college directly after graduation from high school. 1119 public and 222 Catholic schools were given questionnaires which requested information about the school regarding its' educational opportunity for its students. The study found that 54.6% of public school kids went directly to college in comparison to 74.8% of Catholic school kids. This study concluded that Catholic schools are more specialized and hence "produces students oriented to college." Another study conducted by Persell, Catsambis and Cookson studied the differences of class and gender and admission to selective colleges. This study used the High School and Beyond survey to find the characteristics most associated with men and women who attended Post Secondary Institutions and selective colleges. The results of this study found surprising differences between public and private schools. 10.3% of public school males and 9.3% of public school females made it to a selective college in comparison to 76% of males and 78% of females of private schools. This study also found that private schools tend to minimize the effects of gender on getting into selective colleges. This research is interesting because