The principles of agency and time and place are key tenets of the life course perspective. The development of educational goals, a highly impactful agentic process, is generally considered in universalistic terms, however, without consideration of the historical context of opportunity. In this article, we address two research questions. First, do psychological dimensions reflective of agency (optimism, self-esteem, and the academic self-concept) foster teenagers’ educational plans? Second, has the predictive power of these agentic resources changed in recent decades? We address these questions using data from the Youth Development Study, including a cohort of teenagers followed from the late 1980s and since 2009, a panel of their adolescent children. Results from ordinal logistic regressions confirm our hypothesis that agency is more important for educational plans in times of economic stability and opportunity (second generation) than in times of instability and precarity (children of the early second-generation child bearers).
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