Educational expectations are not perfect forecasts of how much education students will acquire. Nonetheless, we should not treat educational expectations as affective fantasies or status-based value orientations. Educational expectations are educational intentions, generated from rational calculations of the costs and benefits of educational training but subject to constant revision in response to new information. This conclusion is supported by an analysis of the association between family-background-adjusted educational expectations of high-school seniors and earnings returns on educational investments of labor market participants between the ages of 26 and 35 years. After an adjustment for family background differences, White high school seniors had lower educational expectations than Black high school seniors in the late 1970s, but increased their expectations relatively more than Black students in the 1980s. Earnings returns on education follow similar patterns across race and sex groups. If educational expectations are overly optimistic, but still based on reasonable cost-benefit calculations, then they can be considered rational fantasies. Further research is needed to determine whether this last possibility is supported by empirical evidence.
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