Onwards and upwards? The educational and occupational expectations of Irish teens of migrant descent

Abstract

While students of immigrant origin often face difficulties during their school career, their educational aspirations and expectations have been found to be relatively high. Less is known, however, about the aspirations and expectations of students of migrant descent in more recent countries of immigration. Furthermore, occupational expectations have received less attention in the literature. Drawing on data from a nationally representative longitudinal study of Irish children, this paper provides the first investigation of the Irish case by comparing the educational and occupational expectations of Irish teens across five ethnic groups. Additionally, it explores how these expectations might translate into entry into third-level education by linking them to subject level choice in secondary school. The results suggest that expectations and subject level choice may be surprisingly similar across the groups, with no evidence of any substantial differences being found.

Keywords:

• Educational expectations
• ethnicity
• Growing Up in Ireland
• migrant background
• occupational expectations
• secondary school

Acknowledgements

Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) is funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY). It is managed by DCEDIY in association with the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Results in this research paper are based on analyses of data from Research Microdata Files provided by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Neither the CSO nor DCEDIY take any responsibility for the views expressed or the outputs generated from these analyses. GUI datasets are made available to researchers on a confidential and anonymised basis through the Irish Social Sciences Data Archive (ISSDA) and the CSO. Work in wave 1, 2 and 3 of the child cohort was carried out under ethical approval granted by a dedicated and independent Research Ethics Committee (REC) convened by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (now the DCEDIY), specifically for the GUI project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Young people of migrant origin in Ireland generally either migrated with their parents (the 1.5 generation), or were born in Ireland of parents, who were born abroad (the second generation). Because Ireland only became a country of net immigration relatively recently, there are fewer third plus generation migrants in Ireland than in European countries with longer histories of immigration.

2 Accession states are defined as 10 countries that joined the EU on 1 May 2004 (i.e. Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia), along with Bulgaria and Romania.

3 As a robustness check we also ran our main analyses with educational and occupational expectations as categorical variables with three categories each. This did not change our conclusions. The results are available upon request.

4 While Irish is a third mandatory subject in Ireland, many students with a migrant background can apply for an exemption from the study of Irish. Hence, we did not include this in our analysis.

5 It is important to note that ethnicity and migrant background overlap to an extremely large extent in Ireland. A very small group of children with native-born parents is not of Irish White ethnicity. For example, in our Wave 1 sample of nearly 9000 children less than 20 children have no foreign-born parent but are of non-white ethnicity. Hence, it is not possible to estimate the effect of ethnicity and migration status on expectations separately. Besides, it is important to note that by sample design all children were born in Ireland or arrived before the age of nine.

6 The Anglo White category largely consists of children with a parent born in the United Kingdom. Considering the historical relations between the UK and Ireland and that the UK has long been a popular destination for Irish emigrants, it is likely that some of the parents with Anglo White ethnicity had Irish roots, thereby potentially making them more similar to the Irish White group than the other non-Irish ethnic groups in our study. Unfortunately, our data does not allow us to explore this further. The Other White category mostly contains children from Accession countries, particularly Poland.

7 Several characteristics of the young person and their family, including ethnicity, were used to adjust for differential inter-wave attrition. More information on inter-wave attrition and the weights can be found in the GUI documentation on the design, instrumentation and procedures for the child cohort.

8 Missing data were substantial for the expected social class of the young person at 19.7%, which was largely due to the fact that many of the jobs the young people expected to get were hard to categorise and hence coded as “employment status unknown” by the GUI team. As a robustness check we therefore run an additional analysis in which we include “employment status unknown” in the other category. Results indicate that our main conclusions are not affected. They are available upon request.