Hope communication as a predictor of documented and undocumented Latina/o high school students’ college intentions across an academic year

Abstract

ABSTRACTDrawing from hope theory, we examined whether hope communication predicted undocumented and documented U.S. Latina/o youth’s college intentions across an academic year. With three waves of survey data from 172 documented and 253 undocumented Latina/o high school students, auto-regressive cross-lagged analyses revealed that parent, teacher, and friend hope communication at the beginning of the year indirectly increased students’ college intentions by the end of the year. A trend emerged whereby undocumented students reported significantly less hope communication and weaker college intentions than documented students within most of the waves. Our findings suggest that hope communication has the potential to increase the educational, economic, and social mobility of Latina/o immigrant students by increasing their intentions to attend college.