Abstract
The notion that students’ aspirations are changeable with age is especially important in education aspirations studies. Researchers have acknowledged that individuals’ aspirations are changeable and the stability of their aspirations is important for reaching their goals. Despite the finding that the misaligned educational and occupational aspirations contribute to long-term adversities, the effect of occupational needs for education on education aspirations has not been estimated in past studies. Using a national representative sample and a hybrid fixed effects model with lagged endogenous variables, this paper investigated the time-varying effect of occupational needs for education on education aspirations over time in combination with observed time-invariant variables such as demographics, self-efficacy, and academic performance. The occupational needs for education turned out to have the strongest impact on all waves of the education aspirations compared to all other predictors. Ethnic group differences are identified in their impact on education aspirations over time. The lasting effects of socioeconomic status and grade point average on education aspirations over time are identified as well. However, there is no lagged effect of education aspirations over time. Several implications and recommendations are offered as the result of the study.