Career Self-Appraisals and Educational Aspirations of Diverse First-Year College Students.
This study examined the career, social, and academic self-appraisals and educational aspirations of first-year college students of diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds. Participants included 72 first-year students of Black, Asian, and White ethnicities. Career self-appraisals were significantly different for Black and Asian students when compared to White students, and subsequent analysis revealed that White students had higher career self-appraisals. Also, educational aspirations were significantly predicted by academic self-appraisals. Practice implications are explored. Keywords: first-year college students, academic self-appraisal, educational aspirations ********** Today, workers in the United States need to be competitive on the global job market, which requires being able to obtain the necessary training and education sought by employers (Hug, hey & Hughey, 1999). The college preparation of students can be vital in securing a job and developing one's career post-graduation. Hence, educators and researchers have taken interest in the success of first-year college students in order to help these students transition from high school to college, and from college to the world of work. Factors associated with first-year college students' success include membership in learning communities and variables such as gender and ethnicity (Zheng, Saunders, Shelley, & Whalen, 2002). Since it has been shown that ethnicity and other cultural factors can influence success and introduce additional issues and barriers, the career development of first-year college students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds is particularly salient (Alipuria, 2008). The psychological distress of these diverse first-year college students can be mitigated by positive parental/familial attachment (Kenny & Perez, 1996), and research with Black and Latino men in their first year of college has indicated that parental encouragement and other factors helped these men choose to pursue college degrees (Contreras-Godfrey, 2009). Additionally, it has been demonstrated that a career development course can help decrease the dysfunctional career thoughts of diverse first-year students (Osborn, Howard, & Leierer, 2007). Of particular interest to the success of these students are the factors of self-efficacy and educational aspirations. Self-efficacy refers to one's belief in one's ability to perform certain tasks (Bandura, 1977), and different areas of self-efficacy relevant to college students have included academic or educational self-efficacy (one's belief in her ability to do tasks associated with academic study), social self-efficacy (belief in his ability to perform social tasks), and career self-efficacy (belief in her ability to do career-oriented tasks) (c.f., Chung & Sedlacek, 1999). Educational aspirations are the level of education an individual is striving towards, and is usually measured by asking people about what degree they plan to achieve. For instance, if a student is currently working towards earning a bachelor's degree, but hopes to earn a master's degree one day, then that person's educational aspiration is a master's degree. In the next two sections, literature pertaining to academic, social, and career self-efficacy as well as educational aspirations for diverse students will be examined. Racial/ethnic diversity of first-year college students and academic, social, and career self-efficacy. Chung and Sedlacek (1999) investigated the academic, social, and career self-appraisals (efficacy) of first-year college students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, and found that White students had higher academic and social self-appraisals than Asian and Black students. Other studies of academic self-efficacy have identified this construct as related to performance and adjustment (Chemers, Hu, & Garcia, 2001), student's feelings of class belonging (Freeman, Anderman, & Jensen, 2007), and college persistence (Kahn & Nauta, 2001). …