Planning for the Future in Rural and Urban High Schools

Abstract

Studies of postsecondary aspirations tend to assume that adolescents from different ethnic groups share commonalities of perspective that are unaffected by the areas in which they live and go to school. Largely missing from this literature is a consideration of the intersection of ethnicity, development, and location. This study looks at the ways in which White and Latino students in an urban and a rural high school differ in their perspectives on postsecondary plans according to grade level, ethnicity, and urbanicity. We find a number of differences in student attitudes and behavior depending on whether students attend rural or urban high schools. High school experiences are also moderated by ethnicity across locations. However, with respect to how students want others to see them, students in the rural high school are more like each other than they are like their ethnic counterparts in the urban school. We conclude that, in many respects, both Latino and White students experience schooling and adolescent development differently in rural and urban schools.