What it is
Youth aspirations are a process of young people hoping and imagining what their lives will be like in the future. Aspirations are not simply formed through individual interest, but through youths’ interactions with other people, institutions, and other aspects of their social lives. For example, neighborhoods, schools, family, and popular culture shape youths’ aspirations.
Higher education is any formal learning after the completion of secondary schooling. Higher education is often framed in terms of broadening career opportunities and youths’ abilities to support their livelihood in the future. But it is more than that. Higher education attainment can broaden opportunities for youth to feel respected, secure a sense of dignity, and be a force for social change.
Why it matters
Having aspirations for higher education matters because it can unlock youths’ abilities to start taking the steps necessary to improve their lives and make a difference in their communities.
In an effort to address social inequalities through higher education attainment, much attention has been given to the notion of raising aspirations among young people, especially for youth in poverty, as a way to help them improve their lives. However, many youth have aspirations for higher education and improved wellbeing, but they simply lack the opportunities to explore the connection between aspirations and aspiration achievement. They also might have doubts about whether or not they can achieve these aspirations. It is for these reasons that youth need opportunities to actively engage with and reimagine their aspirations in a safe, youth-centered environment that leads them to concrete action steps.
What effective practice looks like
Youth programs can be those opportunity-making spaces. They can shape youths’ expectations for the future and help them gain resources and experiences so they can take action steps toward aspiration achievement. Consider the following program practices to effectively help youth nurture their aspirations.
- Youth need to connect their educational aspirations to concrete experiences. Exploring aspirations through hands-on activities with industry professionals, current college students, or on a university campus allows youth to ground their futures into their present, enabling them to start planning.
- Youth need to feel a sense of ease and that they belong in higher education. Create opportunities for youth to learn in college classrooms, eat in the cafeteria, connect with college students around non-academic topics, such as student groups. Make sure youths’ identities are represented in the spaces you help them explore on campus.
- Youth need to engage in future planning activities that prompt them to address underlying social barriers and to rely on support. Help youth reimagine what might be possible for themselves, address self-doubt, overcome institutional barriers, identify mentors, and examine their best pathways to their desired futures.
- Because aspirations are formed through youths’ social interactions, youth need to imagine their futures with others. This can help them build a system of support and enrich their visions for their futures. Youth programs should provide opportunities for youth to share, discuss, and reimagine their aspirations with others, such as program leaders, peers, family members, and community members. A program showcase or family night could create the conditions to achieve this.
Tips for program staff
- Ensure youth have sustained support along their educational pathways. Consider ways to incorporate effective practice in the long-term, sticking with them up until they are ready to attend a post-secondary institution. For example, consider convening annual gatherings with parents, youth, and faculty and institutional agents from higher education.
- Refrain from creating programs designed to only introduce youth to future opportunities. There is no evidence that this is effective. In fact it might lead youth to aspire for a future that they are unprepared to achieve because they never connected their aspirations to their present reality. Help them make a plan to work towards their desired futures.
- While you won’t be able to address all the systemic inequities youth might face, you can help youth explore creative action toward aspiration achievement in the face of them. This could include mapping and naming the barriers and supports in their life and making a plan to begin to dismantle them.
- Consider individuals who can expand youths’ future possibilities and create a role for them in your program. These could be faculty members, current college students, or admissions officers. Help youth build a social network outside of their family and school settings.
- Girls’ educational aspirations and agency: imagining alternative futures through schooling in a low-resourced Tanzanian community
- Higher education, youth and migration in contexts of disadvantage: understanding aspirations and capabilities
- Aspirations and Human Development Interventions
- Keeping hope alive: an analysis of training opportunities for Ghanaian youth in the emerging oil and gas industry
- Aspirations and equality in higher education: gender in a South African university
- The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition
- Introduction: Development, Young People, and the Social Production of Aspirations
- Through the Eyes of Students
- Campus Immersion: Supporting Youth Agency and Aspirations for Higher Education
- The Developmental Relationships Framework
Reviewed in 2023