Gender, parental expectations, socioeconomic status, occupation and choice and attitude toward private vs. public colleges and universities

An important area of study in educational sociology is how race, gender, parental expectations, parental socioeconomic status, and child's educational performance, affect the choice and effort children make in their educational endeavors. Several earlier works have examined gender, race, parental expectation, parental socioeconomic status, the academic goals of the child from pre-school to high school, and how these affect the child's educational motivation, or choice and effort, and how it varies over time. The choice and effort of the child during this time in turn effects their decision to continue their education beyond high school and into college, and what sort of postsecondary educational institution they will enroll in, either private or public. Therefore, the examination of, why does a student decide to go to college or not and what sort of college will they enroll in, needs to occur at a point in time much earlier than when they are about to graduate from high school.; To better interpret the responses given in this study two types of analyses were used. One was general descriptive statistics and the other was correlations. The general descriptive statistics were used to get a better basic understanding of what was occurring while the correlations were used to delve deeper into the relationships that existed between each question in the data. The Pearson product moment correlation was computed at an alpha of .05. This is stating that for two variables, or questions, to have a significant relationship, either negative or positive, their relationship could only be attributable to sampling error five times out of one hundred. A relationship between two variables, or questions, with an alpha greater that .05 is considered to not be significant in nature, since it could occur randomly. These significant relationships can be used to suggest and indicate patterns that have formed between the two variables, or questions, being examined.