Choosing Higher Education: Educationally Ambitious Chicanos and the Path to Social Mobility

Abstract

This is a study of high academic achievement found in the most unlikely places: among low-income Mexican Americans from homes with little formal education. It examines the backgrounds of 50 persons, male and female from one age cohort, who met most of the predictors for school failure or "dropping out." All came from families in which neither parent completed high school or held a job higher than skilled labor; the average father finished grade four and most were sons and daughters of farmworkers and other unskilled laborers. Most began school with Spanish as their primary language, yet all completed doctoral-level educations from the country's most prestigious institutions. This study investigates the forces that conspire to create such anomalies. Its aim is to suggest how such outcomes might be the product of design rather than accident.