High School Students' Career Goals

Literature Review of 12th graders post- graduation plans

In a study pertaining to urban Chinese immigrant high school students, Ma and Yeh (2010) evaluated the influences of urban Chinese immigrant students’ individual and familial factors to determine whether said factors affected the students’ educational and career aspirations, plans, and vocational outcome expectations.  A demographical data sheet, available in both English and Chinese, was distributed to 265 Chinese immigrant students of an alternative high school in New York City.  Of these 265 students: 141 were male and 124 were female, 19.35 was the median age (SD=1.20), and all were from low- income families and received free lunch at school.  (These students were selected by the authors’ “definition” of “immigrant”: immigrated to the United States within the past five years from Mainland China.)  The results indicated that the students who had a higher self- reported English fluency  and parental career- related support proved the authors’ hypothesis of said students having positive career and educational aspirations and the intentions to attend college.  

        Concerning gender differences in career aspirarions, York (2008) conducted an ex-  post facto study of the college and career plans of high school valedictorians to determine “whether the females had aspirations equal to the males at the end of their senior year of high school.”  York gathered her information provided by 150 students from 47 high schools in 10 counties in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina; this information was published in various newspapers in the Research Triangle area.  The information published was basic demographic data of the valedictorian and the high school that s/he had attended.  Both genders expressed great interest in a science major in college; there were no “significant differences” in choosing science as a major or going into a career in healthcare.