Propelled and Persistent: Early High School Parent Involvement and Students’ Higher Education Trajectories

Higher education is widely treated as the preferred outcome for high schoolers in the United States, and parents put considerable effort into encouraging students’ enrollment. Focusing on enrollment alone paints an incomplete picture, however, as the benefits of higher education are largely contingent on earning a degree. To better assess parents’ role in promoting higher education, it is necessary to consider students’ broader educational trajectories. In this article, we explore how parents’ involvement during a critical life course transition—in this case, the transition to high school—continues to matter as students leave high school and make ongoing decisions about their educational futures. Our findings suggest ninth-grade involvement is indeed durable. Parents’ educational attitudes and involvement behaviors at the beginning of high school propel students toward higher education, and for those who enroll, this involvement promotes higher education persistence as well. Furthermore, involvement behaviors compound educational attitudes such that students are most likely to enroll and persist when their parents are involved in multiple different ways. Although ninth graders are still years before the college-going process, parents’ involvement at this critical time may have a long-term influence on students’ educational decision making across the life course.