Abstract
As researchers and school stakeholders determine ways to best support Black and Latino adolescent boys from low-income communities in actualizing their postsecondary future ambitions, more attention is needed on the types of futures these boys imagine and how family members influence this process. Guided by future orientations and possible selves frameworks, this school-based ethnographic study investigated the ways families influenced what the author calls the “postsecondary future selves” of Black and Latino (i.e., U.S.-born Salvadoran) 11th-grade boys (N = 5). Described as what youth conceptualize as possible, likely, and expected for their lives after high school, postsecondary future selves considers three future domains: “college” (postsecondary education), “career” (postcollege employment trajectory), and “condition” (expected financial stability, relational and familial prospects, future living arrangements, happiness, and joy). Findings indicate that families built their boys’ capacities for envisioning and making strides toward ideal futures. Finding “success,” “being somebody,” and “having a future” underscored familial messages that emphasized the salience of college going in obtaining a career and life condition that would lead their boys to finding pride and fulfillment. Implications support stakeholders in building adolescents’ efficacy for threading linkages between college going and college majors, career trajectories, and expected life conditions, thus complementing familial-based supports.
Keywords
Adolescence is a time when many youth begin to plan for their future adult lives. Doing so requires the development of a future orientation, which often includes further educational or career pursuits (Nurmi, 1991, 2005). As they formulate future prospects, adolescents must be mindful of their possible selves, given their strengths, interests, or what they desire to avoid (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Yet envisioning, let alone enacting certain futures, is a freedom not equally possible for all young people. In a racially and economically stratified society, Black and Latino adolescent boys from low-income communities face significant social and school barriers (e.g., ethnic and racial stereotyping, hyper surveillance, disproportional disciplining, low expectations) that stymy them from imagining, let alone actualizing positive future postsecondary aspirations (Carey, 2019b; Conchas & Vigil, 2012; Howard, 2014; Huerta et al., 2018; Irby, 2018; Milner et al., 2018; Rios, 2011; Sáenz et al., 2016; Way & Rogers, 2015). Moreover, when exposed to negative media portrayals (e.g., violent gang members, chauvinists) and limited available life scripts (e.g., athletes, entertainers, exploited laborers), they may feel constrained in their ability to conceptualize, hope for, and pursue other avenues to future fulfillment (Carey, 2019b, 2020; Howard, 2014; Torres et al., 2020).
In the face of racial and ethnic oppression and economic stratification in society and schools, Black and Latino boys depend on their families to help maneuver and overcome barriers to futures hallmarked by college, career, and other life condition goals (e.g., expected financial stability, relational and familial prospects, future living arrangements, happiness, and joy). For stakeholders to implement interventions to support Black and Latino adolescent boys in conceptualizing positive or even liberating futures on their terms, better insights are needed into the kinds of futures these youth imagine and the factors influencing this process. This article offers a conceptual framework, “postsecondary future selves,” which couches what youth conceptualize for their futures along the lines of college, career, and life condition. I also offer an empirical warrant for this framework by examining the role of family socialization and support in shaping the kinds of postsecondary future selves constructed by Black and Latino adolescent boys attending one school in an urban U.S. community.
Postsecondary Future Selves: Toward a New Approach
I define postsecondary future selves as what youth conceptualize as possible, likely, and expected for their immediate postsecondary school lives, given three domains: “college” (i.e., postsecondary education, be it through advanced vocational training, or 2- or 4-year colleges or universities), “career” (i.e., occupation and postcollege employment trajectory) and “condition” (i.e., expected financial stability, relational and familial prospects, future living arrangements, happiness, and joy; see Carey, 2015 for an earlier iteration).
The postsecondary future selves concept is informed by two developmental theories: future orientation (Nurmi, 1991, 2005) and possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986). According to Nurmi (1991), an adolescent’s future orientation couches their thoughts, dreams, and expectations for possible future events. These notions motivate, influence, and guide their goal attainment (Nurmi, 1991, 2005). Future orientations include the kinds of expectations (i.e., content), how far into the future such expectations will occur (i.e., extension), and how people discern the factors influencing their futures (i.e., control beliefs). The content of a youth’s postsecondary future self (e.g., decisions on their college, career, and condition goals) is informed by their own desires and shaped by the expectations and guidance from those including family members and educators. Nurmi (1991) further noted that individuals’ perceptions of their future originate from the knowledge, beliefs, and schemata formed over their life course and society in which they live. Youths’ postsecondary future selves, then, are shaped within the schemata of family, school influences, and among others (e.g., neighborhood, media, and peers).
The concept of postsecondary future selves is also informed by possible selves, which relates to how individuals determine their potential and future likelihoods (Markus & Nurius, 1986; Oyserman et al., 2002). Representing specific, individually significant hopes, fears, and fantasies, possible selves reflect three varying yet complementary levels of self-concept: the feared, hoped for, and expected self (Markus & Nurius, 1986; Oyserman et al., 2002). For the postsecondary future self, youth may be influenced by family members toward or away from college, career, or certain life conditions due to the feared self (e.g., I am drawn to attend college because I fear what will happen with my life if I do not), hoped-for self (e.g., I aspire to play Division 1 college football, though this goal is lofty), or expected self (e.g., I likely will attend college and anticipate that doing so will advance my life goals).
Other widely used research or practitioner models oriented toward preparing youth for life after high school typically focus on college-going interventions (see Hooker & Brand, 2010; Knight & Marciano, 2013), college and career readiness (see Conley, 2007), or the C3 Framework (e.g., college, career, civic life; National Council for the Social Studies, 2014). Another framework considers how youth forge pathways between college, career, and their cultural identities (Cooper, 2011). Yet, these approaches offer minimal attention to youths’ motivation for college and careers based on expectations of certain life conditions.
Postsecondary future selves reflect a series of goals or pursuits that reasonably align, or thread together, and that adolescents internalize through self-appraisals. Here, adolescents would pursue college to support career choices and desired life conditions. Encouragement from family members and educators is critical to help adolescents formulate such aligned ambitions (Schneider & Stevenson, 1999), sustain effort, delay gratification, and thwart barriers to actualizing articulated goals (Farrington et al., 2012; Nurmi, 1991). Yet, conceptualizing postsecondary future selves may be daunting for Black and Latino boys from low-income communities. They often maneuver systemic threats to their present lives (e.g., anti-Black racism, xenophobia, violence, environmental toxins), receive inadequate supports for attaining college-based careers and have few proximal examples of lives they may yearn for (Howard, 2014; Howard et al., 2019). By deploying postsecondary future selves to nuance not only the present experiences but also the radical future imaginings of systematically marginalized Black and Latino boys, greater possibilities exist for understanding how they work toward positive futures unseen and perhaps unimagined in many schools and society (Carey, 2019b, 2020; Singh, 2021).
More widely studied are factors that compel Black and Latino adolescents toward college and career aims (Goings & Sewell, 2019; Howard et al., 2019; Huerta et al., 2018; Savitz-Romer & Bouffard, 2012; Warren, 2017). Yet, elements of the condition domain (e.g., expected financial stability, relational and familial prospects, future living arrangements, happiness, and joy) remain less explored, especially when tied to Black and Latino adolescent boys’ college and career ambitions (i.e., If I go to college, what type of career and life condition do I expect?).
Notably, the life condition I theorize and investigate involves more than just adolescents’ understanding or motivation for financial accumulation resulting from college-based careers. Venturing on a college and career pathway that offers ample financial benefits—pursuing “the American dream”—may undergird elements of an individual’s well-being and, thus, a satisfying life condition. Yet, researchers have found that those who seek excessive capital accumulation and financial success also report lower satisfaction with psychological well-being dimensions, including positive relationships with family (Nickerson et al., 2003). Moreover, U.S. middle-class ideals for what counts as “success,” reinforced in schools, do not always draw from cultural knowledges within communities of color that value familial or collective uplift more than individualist pursuits for fiscal gain (Carey, 2016; Howard et al., 2019). The flourishing future life condition conceptualized by Black and Latino boys may be unhooked from the status quo outcomes that privilege White middle-class sensibilities or notions of the American dream.
The condition domain is intentionally expansive and imaginative in scope. At its core, condition explores how adolescents conceptualize the ways their college and career pursuits lead to two of the six dimensions of Ryff and Keyes’ (1995) notion of psychological well-being: positive relations and environmental mastery. Particularly, condition focuses on maintaining or forming positive relationships with others (e.g., future family prospects) and environmental mastery or managing one’s life and surrounding worlds effectively (e.g., future living arrangements, financial stability, even happiness and joy). Black and Latino boys and young men from low-income communities who seek college-based careers may encounter dissonance when achieving their own optimal life condition, due in part to weighing familial needs with individual desires (Carey, 2018). These two dimensions of psychological well-being (positive relations and environmental mastery)—one that centers an individual’s relationships with present and expected family; the other centering self-management—reflects a straddling between worlds (see Carey, 2020) that Black and Latino men from economically marginalized communities encounter when achieving college and career goals.
Importantly, psychological well-being is just a starting point here. I posit that Black and Latino adolescent boys can conceptualize life conditions beyond what others render possible or even fathomable through the lens of middle-class sensibilities. This means family and radical educators may be able to encourage boys to imagine their future selves in previously “unthought of worlds” (Carey, 2020; Hartman & Wilderson, 2003) of possibility. Given this theoretical commitment, I deliberately allowed the condition domain to be an exploratory venture in this study. While it takes up dimensions of psychological well-being, the condition domain is less bounded by previously established theory, and thus is a far more conceptually exploratory and even imaginative endeavor.
The Role of Families in Shaping Postsecondary Future Selves
The postsecondary future selves framework aligns with prior theorizing underscoring the ways adolescents formulate future goals informed by their experiences, general future outlooks, and interpretations of influences emerging from multiple social contexts (e.g., family, peer, and school; Auerbach, 2007; Brown & Jones, 2004; Carey, 2016, 2018; Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006). Among these motivating influences, family members are among the most salient (Hill et al., 2004; Kerpelman et al., 2008). This may come as a surprise to some; while adolescents often prioritize peer relationships and seek autonomy from nuclear family (Youniss & Smollar, 1987), studies show that adolescents of color especially rely on and benefit from familial supports and other forms of buy-in for future goal attainment (Carey, 2016; George Mwangi et al., 2020; McElhaney et al., 2009; Smetana, 2011). In this section, I explore prior studies that examine how families influence elements of Black and Latino boys’ postsecondary future selves along the lines of college, career, and condition.
Family and Black and Latino Boys’ Educational and College Ambitions
An expansive research base has shown the positive relationship between family supports and adolescents’ educational ambitions and attainment (Bandura et al., 2001; Chavira et al., 2016; Hill et al., 2004; Kao & Tienda, 1998). Black and Latino families offer myriad protective, nonacademic supports that augment children’s educational engagement, such as ensuring their safety and monitoring their academic and social lives (Azmitia & Brown, 2002; Brody et al., 2006; Mandara, 2006). When Black families strengthen their boys’ academic self-efficacy, teach them about cultural heritage, and offer strategies to thwart barriers, school success greatly increases (Kerpelman et al., 2008; Mandara, 2006). Latino families supplement school learning with educación, a child-rearing norm rooted in respect and morality that emphasizes avoiding trouble, studying hard, and using educational advantages to secure better lives (Auerbach, 2007; Carey, 2021; Chambers et al., 2015; Torres et al., 2020; Valdés, 1996).
Black and Latino families also influence their children’s education by choosing the most ideal school and by molding their educational ambitions (Allen, 2015; Auerbach, 2007; Carey, 2021; Chapman et al., 2018; Freeman, 2012; Jenkins, 2020; Johnson & McGowan, 2017; Knight & Marciano, 2013; Quiñones & Kiyama, 2014). The Black mothers in Cooper’s (2007) study chose certain schools based on their beliefs that education would help their children “become financially independent; to compete against more affluent peers; to protect and defend themselves in a racist society; and to have greater life options” (p. 498). Research on how Latino families motivate their children’s educational ambitions challenges Eurocentric notions of a college degree’s perceived value. In Pérez Huber et al.’s (2018) study with Latino students and families, they found the college degree, or papelito, was less sought after for its perceived economic value as for the degree’s symbolism of “a collective struggle and a collective victory that extends far beyond the individual” (p. 209).
Black and Latino family members (e.g., parents, extended family, fictive kin) support and encourage postsecondary educational ambitions in spite of systemic barriers (Sánchez et al., 2006), limited “college knowledge” (i.e., understandings of the college admission process) (Hooker & Brand, 2010), and minimal understandings of financial aid (Carey, 2016, 2018, 2019a; Goings & Sewell, 2019). Black and Latino adolescent boys also rely heavily on fictive kin to serve as proximal college and career role models and motivators (Carey, 2016; Scott & Deutsch, 2021). Such support mechanisms may be invisible to educators but are culturally rooted, congruent to familial and community norms, and thus salient in motivating children’s college-going mindsets and ambitions (Carey, 2016, 2021; Patrón, 2020).
Familial Influence on Black and Latino Boys’ Career Aspirations
Families are key in shaping how Black and Latino boys and young men form career aspirations (Chung et al., 1999; Huerta, 2015; Martinez & Castellanos, 2018; Moore, 2006). In a study within an urban context, ninth-grade students who perceived familial support were more likely to recognize work as salient in their lives, had greater desire to lead in their field of interest, and believed career planning would lead to future work satisfaction (Kenny et al., 2003). In their study of six Black men, Chung et al. (1999) found that role modeling from fathers or father-figures nurtured the desire to pursue college degrees and certain careers options.
Studies have shown that families of color from low-income communities foster their boys’ career aspirations with emotional encouragement rather than specific career advice. In a study with Latino middle-school boys, Martinez and Castellanos (2018) found that although parents offered “academic and career encouragement, they did not possess the knowledge necessary to guide students’ academic pursuits. The encouragement parents provided, however, served as a source of motivation for students” (p. 387). Findings from Martinez and Castellanos’s research and other studies (Carey, 2016, 2021) reveal families emphasize good grades and behavior as precursors to obtaining a fulfilling career and life. Notably, adolescents form career aspirations via an interactive process, where “the individual both influences and is influenced by the social, cultural, and physical features of his or her environment” (Whiston & Keller, 2004, p. 493). While Black and Latino boys from low-income homes often take parental advice at higher levels than White adolescents (Fuligni et al., 1999; Smetana, 2011), this may come from culturally rooted logics or a felt need to weigh personal college and career ambitions against familial economic needs (Carey, 2018, 2019a; Covarrubias et al., 2019; Patrón, 2020).
Familial Influence on Black and Latino Boys’ Future Life Condition
Studies of Black and Latino parents or family members show how parenting styles and cultural norms influence elements of what I theorized earlier as boys’ future life conditions (Allen, 2015; Cooper, 2007; Halfond et al., 2012). Black mothers seek to ensure “their kids become more prosperous and face fewer hardships than they themselves have” (Cooper, 2007, p. 499). Allen (2015) found that Black families influenced their sons’ desires to attain eventual life stability by molding their approaches to school. Parental expectations shaped Allen’s (2015) participants’ perceptions of school’s importance for obtaining a “stable future” or being ready to “juggle” “real-world” responsibilities (p. 217). Latino families rear children to uphold “familismo,” where the family’s needs and interests transcend those of the individual (Smith-Morris et al., 2013). Instead of seeking fiscal or material gain, Latino children are raised to prioritize self-respect, responsibility for others, and being well-behaved members of society (Azmitia & Brown, 2002; Halfond et al., 2012; Yowell, 2000).
Studies with men of color sharing reflective accounts reveal the crucial role of families in molding their eventual life conditions. Fathers, uncles, and father-figures often shape the understandings Black men have of being a husband, marriage, and other family values (Hurt et al., 2017). Studies show that girls have far clearer and more realistic concepts of what their future lives might entail related to family- or household-related phenomena, than do boys (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006; Sirin et al., 2004). In Sirin et al.’s (2004) mixed-gender study of adolescents’ aspirations, girls revealed clearer elements of marriage, parenting, and other interpersonal images in collage art conveying their expected future life styles, while boys displayed cars, palatial houses, and other status indicators. The boys sought lifestyles that mirrored that of professional athletes and entertainers. Findings like this and from others (Howard, 2014; Rogers & Way, 2016; Torres et al., 2020) reveal how societal gender socialization and media steer boys of color toward grandiose and often unrealistic materialistic aspirations that minimize emotional, interpersonal, or relational components in their futures.
Although familial expectations and educational supports are salient, how Black and Latino adolescents actually interpret and internalize familial messaging reveals what may actually propel their goal actualization (Carey, 2021; Ford, 1993). Notably, Black and Latino boys internalize family influences in relation to other forces (e.g., media, neighborhood, etc.) in deciding life options (Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006; Yowell, 2000). Dodging negative outcomes like street involvement, gangs, and poverty induce the “feared-selves” that may drive Black and Latino boys from urban areas to imagine alternate future life conditions (Brooms, 2019; Huerta, forthcoming; Huerta et al., 2018 ). They may seek out college and career choices to do better and to enhance the lives of relatives who could not obtain such chances (Howard, 2014).
Research reveals the myriad ways families influence the college, career, and life condition ambitions of Black and Latino boys. However, most prior work isolates one or two of the three domains, which limits our understanding of comprehensive forces forming youth’s mindsets. Unique to this study is the concept of postsecondary future selves and an exploration into how three mutually reinforcing domains (college, career, and condition, colloquially referred to as the 3Cs) underscore familial influence on adolescents’ future outlooks. An ethnographic approach offers nuanced perspectives, voiced by boys themselves within the context of their school, as opposed to retrospective accounts from adults, a feature often missing from studies investigating similar topics. Thus, this study adds to a growing qualitative and ethnographic developmental psychology research base on how adolescents build on family influences within educational contexts to enact future aspirations (Huerta, forthcoming; Huerta et al., 2018; Langenkamp & Shifrer, 2018; Savitz-Romer & Bouffard, 2012; Sirin et al., 2004).
Importantly, Black and Latino adolescent boys who live in low-income neighborhoods and attend schools in urban communities are not a monolithic group. My intention in studying boys from both ethnoracial groups is to neither conflate nor compare their experiences. While they share identities as boys who experience and resist barriers in class-subjugated neighborhoods, their racial or ethnic identity, color or phenotype, and family’s experiences with economic stress, emerging bilingualism, or documentation status, affords them privilege and penalty differently within societal hierarchies that are upheld in institutions like schools (Brooms, 2019; Carey et al., 2018; Ghavami et al., 2016). And the ease with which they gain access to future opportunities and ambitions is typically based on their positioning in this social order. However, Black and Latino families draw from their distinct cultural knowledge bases to buffer their boys against the impacts of intersecting oppressions, ethnoracial opportunity gaps, and other social forces that pre-empt them from envisioning and seizing bright futures.
Black and Latino adolescents also share gendered experiences within ecological contexts that systemically undervalue them. Race and economic caste systems render their bodies and behavior socially threatening and lead many toward futures where their labor will be exploited (Carey, 2019b; Rogers & Way, 2016; Sáenz et al., 2016). Within the contexts that they formulate their futures (e.g., schools), their experiences with ethnoracial and class subjugation may compel them to foreclose life options deemed not viable.
Instead of directing resources toward dismantling systems that foreclose on Black and Latino boys’ futures, intervention programs led by well-meaning educators and clinicians are often geared toward fixing them or re-orienting their perceived inadequacy (Carey, 2019b; Singh, 2021). One way this occurs is through a seemingly unshakeable obsession with comparing these boys’ present actions and future prospects to White middle-class standards of respectability (Oeur, 2017; Singh, 2021). We afford little space to understanding how these boys envision their futures beyond standards that perpetually marginalize them and their familial attributes. So, while they are racially and ethnically unique, Black and Latino boys together develop and conceptualize their postsecondary future selves in school contexts that often value their adherence to White norms. This study explored Black and Latino boys together, given their shared accounts and experiences at one urban school, yet doing so was not meant to present them as the same. Rather, by considering elements of what Black and Latino boys do share, we can learn how to make schools they attend more attuned to their needs and more creative in how stakeholders implement supports for building their futures.
The Current Study
This study sought to expand existing understandings of the ways adolescent Black and Latino boys from low-income communities conceptualize their future lives after high school, and how their families guide and support them in doing so. Beyond advancing the concept of postsecondary future selves, the following question guided the investigation and analysis: how do Black and Latino adolescent boys attending one urban, college-preparatory high school describe the ways their families (e.g., nuclear, extended, and fictive kin) influenced their conceptualizations of their postsecondary future selves?
Data comes from a nearly school-year long (8 months) ethnographic case study of Metropolitan Collegiate Public Charter School (pseudonym), referenced also as Metro Collegiate or Metro. This study was part of a larger investigation into how Metro’s college-going culture and the families of Black and Latino boys shaped participants’ postsecondary future selves. These investigations were designed to explore how ethnically and racially marginalized adolescents conceptualize college, career, and life condition as complimentary, overlapping, and aligned domains. In this study, I, like others (see Caraballo & Filipiak, 2020; Marciano et al., 2020; Savitz-Romer & Bouffard, 2012) sought to expand myopic college and career “readiness” discourses and interventions that dominate the landscape of many urban U.S. high schools serving Black and Latino adolescents from low-income communities (see Conley, 2007). Findings stress how vital it is for school stakeholders to reinforce and complement messages about interconnected future life pursuits that Black and Latino youth glean from their families and communities.
Methods
Research Setting
Situated in a large Mid-Atlantic U.S. city, Metro Collegiate served approximately 1,000 pre-K-12 students during the 2013–14 school year. I studied the 320-student high school division, which was 54% Latina/o/x (e.g., mostly Salvadoran), 41% Black, 2% White, 1.5% Asian, and 1.5% other ethnoracial identifiers. Nearly 16% of students were English-language learners, and 79% qualified for free and reduced-priced meals. I chose Metro Collegiate as a research site for its high population of Latina/o/x and Black students and its college-going focus. With this college emphasis, I assumed Metro students would be primed for robust discussions about specific factors shaping elements of their postsecondary future selves.
Metro offered a college-preparatory curriculum, complemented by an intense “college-going culture” (see McDonough, 1997). College pennants, students’ college-acceptance letters, and scholarship notifications donned the hallways; and educators and counselors offered consistent messaging to ensure students were taking steps to transition successfully to higher educational institutions after graduation. Students were mandated to take yearly college tours and were supported by two college counselors in applying to at least three colleges or universities. Like other public charter schools in the city, admission to Metro was open to any family and was noncompetitive. Given its popularity, Metro had a long waitlist of interested families. Its appeal, driven by its 100% college-acceptance record and reputation as a safe learning environment, placed it in the top tier of the city’s public schools, based on parental satisfaction scores.
Procedures and Participant Recruitment
Investigating postsecondary future selves with 11th graders (juniors) was ideal for this study. While adolescents generally are tasked with preparing for their futures (Nurmi, 1991), college-going 11th-grade students are deeply invested in crystallizing their future educational plans (Hossler et al., 1999). Once I gained Metro’s administrative endorsement and University IRB approval, I met with a history teacher to determine a recruitment strategy.
Junior class moderators gave me time during one of their weekly meetings to recruit participants. During my brief presentation, I shared the study’s topic (e.g., who wants to spend time discussing how you think about your futures after high school and what influences you in doing so?), the time requested for participation (e.g., three interviews after school, observations), participant incentives (e.g., a restaurant gift card and t-shirt from the university I represented at the time), and the required parental and child permission forms for interested students. Lucas and Malik (all student names are pseudonyms) returned their forms days later, noting their interest in the topic and incentives offered. Soon after, I started interviews and, given the ethnographic nature of this study, began to immerse myself in Metro’s community to explore its culture. I observed participants in classes and was invited by Lucas and Malik’s history teacher to co-chaperone three field trips. I then met and chatted informally with King, Samuel, and Perdido in classes, hallways, and on one of the field trips. I was compelled by their insights and eventually built a rapport with them. From our chats and during observations of small- and large-group class discussions with other participants, I gathered how diverging their interests and dispositions were. I thought their insights would illuminate the topic under study, so I reminded them of the study’s purpose and the incentives, solicited their participation, and provided them permission forms. All three, like Lucas and Malik, returned their forms and agreed to be interviewed and observed throughout the year.
As seen in Table 1, all five participants were born and raised in a large Mid-Atlantic U.S. city, and were 17 years of age for a majority of the study, with the exception of King, who was 16. Perdido and Lucas self-described as second-generation Salvadoran (both sets of parents immigrated to the United States from El Salvador), while Malik, Samuel, and King self-described as U.S.-born Black or African American. To offer participants’ greater ownership of their narratives, each chose their own pseudonyms. Participants selected these for various reasons. King aspired to public regard for his intellectual and athletic greatness, while Perdido (translated from Spanish as “lost”) believed his chosen name reflected a candid belief of his uncertain life path.
Descriptive Data for Participants.
Note. GPA = grade point average.
Aligning with an ethnographic case study design (Merriam, 2009), this investigation was bounded by both space (e.g., participants attended the same school) and time (e.g., data were gathered between November 2013 and June 2014). As the study focused on how participants understood familial influences on their postsecondary future selves, I was interested in the boys’ interpretations as opposed to their families’ actual voiced perspectives. Thus, interviewing or observing family members was beyond the scope of this study.
I used four in-depth, semistructured interview protocols (see Table 2 for sample questions) for participants, mostly with questions created prior to data collection. Given this study’s ethnographic nature, multiple interviews were needed to elicit how participants construed meanings out of influences emerging from their cultural worlds, including family and school (Heyl, 2001). Moreover, Seidman (2006) warned that qualitative researchers who interview with “one-shot” meetings risk treading on “thin contextual ice” (p. 17). Thus, to align with Seidman’s in-depth approach, I conducted interviews over a series of three meetings, eventually adding a fourth. The interview questions explored how participants conceptualized the role of college, career, and condition in their future lives. Questions were geared toward having participants envision elements of their expected futures and determine who or what factors influenced their conceptualizations. Questions about each domain of the 3Cs (e.g., college, career, and condition) appeared in all interview protocols. Interviews were designed to occur over multiple one-on-one meetings to gain increasingly deeper, more candid insights. They took place over the course of months and evolved organically. I adhered to the initial protocol, crafting certain follow-up questions. Some catered to participants’ specific experiences, while others were drawn from insights gathered during observations and my own hunches. Given the rich conversations and time constraints, I eventually added the fourth interview during data collection to ensure all participants had the opportunity to respond fully to added prompts.
Postsecondary Future Selves Sample Interview Questions.
Given the larger study’s aims, I conducted observations within classrooms and informal school spaces, typically 3 days per week, to understand Metro’s college-going culture from participants’ perspectives. While findings herein draw from interview data, the ethnographic observations shaped this study of family-based socialization processes, as well as further refined predetermined, semistructured interview protocols. Field notes taken during observations of class meetings that discussed college-going topics made me wonder if Metro educators understood what families did to reinforce, complement, or even challenge college-going messaging and supports for future pursuits. Observational data helped me understand broader school processes and tailor participant interview questions to uncover familial-based influences working in tandem with school-based practices.
I interviewed four of the five participants four times in classrooms or meeting rooms after school, with each lasting between 45 to 60 minutes. I interviewed Lucas twice, which was all his active after-school program schedule would allow. However, I was able to extend our second interview to 90 minutes to cover all questions. Interviews were digitally recorded, uploaded to a secure server, and transcribed professionally (Verbal Ink).
Analysis and Positionality
Analysis
Keeping with the dynamic and recursive analysis process entailed in ethnographic case study methodology (Merriam, 2009), I triangulated and analyzed data while in the field to refine interview protocols. I read and edited each transcribed interview prior to follow-up interviews and, prior to follow-up interviews, provided member checking or “respondent validation” (Merriam, 2009), by encouraging participants to read and correct any misrepresented data revealed in hard copies of transcripts.
I was the sole coder and created deductive codes based on elements of the three domains of the postsecondary future selves framework. Codes also reflected elements of school and family socialization practices that influenced participants to determine elements of their postsecondary future selves. I used Atlas.ti (a qualitative data analysis software) to code field notes of the visually rich college-going culture and experiences, such as junior class meetings centered on college going. I used the same codes to analyze interview data through a multilayered process to determine how participants’ families influenced their conceptualizations of their postsecondary future selves. As I deductively coded each participant interview using family, college, career, and condition, more than a dozen inductive codes became present, such as father influence on college going, vision of success, and uncles’ influence. I employed more than 200 codes, mindful of how data source coded-excerpts overlapped. When coded-excerpts revealed a participant describing their postsecondary future selves along the lines of (and often at the junction of) college, career, and condition, I tracked overlaps with other coded-excerpts of familial influence. Where overlaps occurred, I created “families of coded-excerpts” that offered insights into the ways family members influenced participants in conceptualizing postsecondary future selves. I distilled these families into the themes that make up the findings discussed here.
Positionality
Lincoln (1995) urges interpretive researchers, who seek honesty and scholarly authenticity, to “come clean” about their positionality to their investigated phenomena (p. 58). In addition, Milner (2007) prompts researchers to acknowledge how their identity shapes their positionality while studying racially, ethnically, and economically marginalized communities. I arrived to this study as a middle-class Black cisgender man from a nurturing family who positively fostered my postsecondary future self. I attended college and graduate school, sought my career as an educator and researcher, and was able to achieve a life condition that mirrored much of what I imagined when I was the study participants’ age. I challenged lingering assumptions about what was best or right for my participants, and instead listened to how and why their families influenced them. As an ethnic and cultural outsider to my Salvadoran participants, I built trust by humbly seeking their tutelage on Salvadoran culture and familial norms, of which I knew little. I engaged them and my Black participants in casual chats about their drama and dreams between classes, in the lunch room, and during field trips. Building trusting relationships with participants afforded meaningful connections, which spurred them to share richer insights as the study progressed. They were open with me and, in turn, I was open about my journey to and through college and my early career, all of which contributed to my eventual life condition.
I also approached this study as a former high school English teacher. I had taught in the same city as Metro and in schools that advocated college going for Black and Latino youth. Hence, I came with hunches based on my familiarity with what former students had encountered. The daunting and often devastating academic and social challenges after high-school life presents for many U.S. Black and Latino boys and young men, just like my participants, compelled me to study their postsecondary future selves in the first place. However, presented here are their perspectives, their dreams, their unadulterated ambitions, largely drawn from their families’ influences. Although I am familiar with the ethos of schools like Metro, and the marginalization students from urban communities encounter, the boys’ perspectives are centralized, not my own.
Findings
In this section, findings drawn from participants’ voiced perspectives appear with analysis and initial discussion. In sharing these four thematic findings, I do so with close attention to how ethnic-based, racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic determinants informed the rationale for familial encouragements that shaped participants’ postsecondary future selves.
Become Better; Find Success; Be Somebody
The first theme is participants’ families influenced the ways they conceptualized their postsecondary future selves, with encouragements to become better, find success, and be somebody. Specifically, family members pressed them to go to college, land a fulfilling career or vocation as opposed to just “a job,” and to be “better.” However, in spite of economic stress and low-income statuses, family members resisted urging participants toward specific colleges, majors, or careers that would increase their earnings at the sake of their pride or happiness.
For Malik, King, and Samuel, securing a fulfilling postsecondary future self by becoming “somebody” was deemed a resistance tactic in a racially and economically stratified world that limited opportunities for Black boys who became Black men. For instance, King’s father knew firsthand how difficult it would be for his son to, as King noted, “make it” as a Black man in the world without a college education. King’s father was able to attend a prestigious HBCU (a Historically Black College or University) after leaving a neighborhood hampered by street violence caused by racial segregation and economic disinvestment. But, King’s father dropped out of college and never returned when King’s older brother was unexpectedly conceived. King noted, “He wanted to be there to take care of his son.” While his choice to leave college led to King’s father toiling in low-income jobs, this experience offered King positive gender-based role modeling. King saw the importance of taking care of familial responsibilities, even if it meant forgoing his own dreams. But King’s father did not want his son to have to make the choices he did. King’s father wanted “better” for his son’s postsecondary future self, and King’s responsibility was to ensure he found “better” on his terms. When I asked what his family expected for his future, he noted: “They see me somewhere that I’m supposed to be like some smart person or somebody with a good job, something like that . . . College is important, I mean, my father drills me about going to college.” King’s family expected that in his immediate future he was “somewhere” where he was “supposed to be,” meaning in college and pursuing his dreams unencumbered. King’s family provided him encouragements and supports to ensure this expectation was met. For King and other Black boys from racially isolated, low-income communities, the consequences for not doing so could result in low-income toil, the trappings of street economies, or even violence.
While both Lucas’s and Perdido’s parents fostered their sons’ academic self-efficacy to meet college admission requirements that would lead to college-based careers, they were more interested in fostering the Latino cultural value educación (e.g., pride, respect, and morality) as a mechanism for their ideal postsecondary future selves. Lucas noted:
They just want me to live a happy life and have a stable job. They can’t force me to become anything, if I’m not interested. They just tell me “whatever you become, just be proud of it” and “make sure you like your job or your career.”
Lucas’s parents encouraged him to find stability, enjoyment, and pride in his postsecondary future self, supporting his agency to choose a life path responsive to his own interests. By aligning the domains of career (e.g., “stable job”) with condition (e.g., “happy life”) and “pride,” this example reveals how encouragements for the overlapping domains of postsecondary future selves were supported with culturally rooted familial logics.
Describing and imagining their postsecondary future selves with much specificity beyond college proved challenging. This could have been from the lack of examples Black and Latino boys encounter of lives lived by similarly raced/gendered college graduates from their communities. Thus, to probe further, I asked participants to describe how they conceptualized “success” and a “good life,” given familial influences. In response, Lucas and Perdido provided examples of how, in spite of extreme poverty and ethnic and linguistic marginalization in the United States, their fathers were successful men.
He’s successful, because he has a family. He has a stable job. He’s living in the same house for the past 15, 16 years, but I mean he wants me just to do better than he did.
So, what do you think “better” looks like for him?
I think it’s being able to study, go to college, and graduate and get a career you actually like or want or are interested in because maybe you could become someone. You could go into any field, any job. But if you don’t like the job, and you don’t feel satisfied, you don’t feel happy.
Lucas interpreted his father’s ability to find stability for his family as proof of success. Given that his father is an immigrant from El Salvador, Lucas’s perspectives were informed by all his father overcame. In spite of migrating from El Salvador to the United States with only a fifth-grade education, growing up a poor Brown boy, having no English-language skills, and finding barriers to U.S. schooling, his father worked diligently with his mother to create a stable family existence. Key in this quoted-excerpt is the importance “having a family” was to how Lucas interpreted success. Salvadoran boys and men place significant cultural importance on the gendered role men play in ensuring the well-being of the family. Although his father inspired his devotion to family, this was a baseline from where he theorized what finding and doing “better” meant. For Lucas, finding “better” meant building a postsecondary future self that extended beyond what was possible for his father. It meant using his education to attain employment outcomes that would ensure economic stability, life enjoyment, and success. In expressing this sentiment, Lucas threaded college, career, and condition by deciphering success through his father’s messaging. Finding “better,” however, did not mean earning more money to acquire unneeded possessions. Here Lucas described a good life: It’s not good to be materialistic, and my father has always told me that. Like, “Never be materialistic!” He said if you keep on wanting more, that’s bad. So, a good life will be living your life, liking what you do. So never ask for more of what you can’t have, or what you shouldn’t. Having too much of a good thing is a bad thing. That’s how I see it.
While both Lucas and his father grew up with limited material resources, having happiness and pride was a more desirable goal for Lucas’s postsecondary future self than having things.
Perdido’s parents, who migrated to the United States from El Salvador as young adults, had differing perspectives on what educational or career success would entail. Perdido noted, “My mom wants me to become a doctor; she made that clear. She wanted [me] to become a doctor, ’cause she wanted to be a nurse . . . My dad just wants me to be successful.” Although confining gendered norms (e.g., girls become nurses; boys, doctors) were at play, Perdido’s mom urged her son to be a physician to fulfill dreams she was denied. But, Perdido had access to educational opportunities that evaded his immigrant mom. Hence, she tried to mold her son’s postsecondary future based on her experiences being marginalized because of her education level, income, and immigration status. I then asked Perdido to share his father’s influence on the notion of success.
I guess for him being successful is like just staying out the system, you know?
Like out of. . .what do you mean by system?
Out of trouble. . .Having a future in something; not just like roaming around aimlessly. . .Get the opportunities that they didn’t have and use that as an advantage, to be somebody. You know, whether it be like a successful mechanic or like a lawyer or doctor. Something. He wants me to have a plan, basically.
For Perdido’s father, success meant being “somebody” as opposed to a wanderer who gets caught in the legal system. Being somebody reflected the Latino value of educación, in which living morally and avoiding trouble trumped earning large sums of money. Intriguingly, while he enrolled his son in a college-oriented high school, Perdido’s father was open to his son finding success for his postsecondary future self in blue-collar work, like being a mechanic. Perdido’s father was a head gardener for a well-regarded company, and Perdido held his father’s trade “working with his hands” to be an honorable and desirable job among Salvadoran men. While college was preferred to become that “somebody” through careers in law or medicine, Perdido recalls his father harping on his needing a plan to find success, no matter the field.
In sum, families drew from their own culturally rooted knowledge base and experiences with racial marginalization and economic stratification to foster their sons’ postsecondary future selves with notions of success, having a future, having a plan, or becoming somebody. For King and other Black boys, family members emphasized college was more of a mechanism to avoid both low-paying jobs and the omnipresent threat of risky street life. It also was a clearer path into postsecondary future selves, or rather careers and life conditions that would merit the “better” participants’ families sought for them. For Lucas’s and Perdido’s Salvadoran immigrant families, college was the surest but not the only path to a desired career and life condition that would contribute to becoming “somebody”—the ideal postsecondary future self. Shaping their perspectives were gendered norms and Latino cultural values that prioritized morals and pride over capital or material accumulation.
Couching Postsecondary Future Selves Messaging
A second theme was that familial-based postsecondary future selves encouragement or messages were couched in mutually reinforcing or complementary ways. This theme nuances how families conveyed postsecondary future selves messaging for becoming better, finding success, and being somebody and reveals how participants internalized such messages.
Given the ethnoracial and economic barriers that keep many Black and Latino people marginalized, most families deemed college going necessary for securing a semblance of a “better” career or condition. As such, participants’ family members (e.g., nuclear, extended, and fictive kin) couched complementary messages about the role of educational attainment in procuring a better life economically. King’s father, who faced economic stress in his young adulthood, threaded college, career, and condition together as aligned ambitions by harping on the likelihood of “getting nowhere” without an education. King noted: He always stressed to me that education is important because, really, you can’t get nowhere without it, unless I wanna work in McDonald’s or something. And I refuse to work at McDonald’s. I mean, it’s okay, but I don’t see myself working at McDonald’s like 10 years from now. That’s not what I see. So, I mean, education is important.
As participants internalized the role of education in their postsecondary future selves, they did so by interpreting familial metaphorical messages drawn from prior economic struggles in addition to anticipated scenarios. Such anticipated scenarios were based on imagining what racial and economic marginalization awaited boys as they ascended into manhood. King further recounted his father preaching to him: If you go to the NFL [National Football League], you want an education, because you don’t want to have to pay nobody to read your contract. If you smart enough and get your education, you can make your own contract, and pick your own numbers. You should always be able to read your own contract. He said some people got the talent, but they don’t have it up in their head. Some people hire agents and be like, “Can you read my contract, and tell me what it say?” And you gotta pay people for that. I think it’s dumb.
King’s postsecondary future self was tied to dreams for being a professional football player in the NFL. During the time of data collection, Black men made up 67.3% of all players in the NFL, yet only 13% of those were in senior administrator positions. Partly from representational disparities like these, the NFL had a reputation as an enterprise that exploited the labor of Black men for extreme capital gain (Lapchick, 2014). King’s father wanted his son to resist the exploitative patterns that landed athletically talented, yet misinformed Black men as victims when they ventured into the realm of professional sports.
King interpreted his father’s messaging for his postsecondary future self as a professional athlete in ways that linked a college education with eventual career and economic stability. Familial messages like those from King’s account not only show how key an education is but also how family members orient their boys toward an imagined future hallmarked by a better life or greater life satisfaction. These imagined futures were also those that evaded the lives of other Black and Latino men from low-income communities. Familial urgings for a “better life” also emerged in my discussions with Malik, whose mother urged him to attend college as a step toward obtaining a job in a field he enjoyed while providing him with a comfortable salary.
So, like she wants me to go to college so that I’ll have a better life for myself than having to live paycheck to paycheck, or a job that I don’t like. Or I can just go to a job that I do like and live easy—live under my means, basically.
Like what do you mean by “better life?”
Like have an easy life instead of having to work hard every single day just to make ends meet.
Malik’s mother couched the importance of college degree attainment with a desirable career that would merit a comfortable salary and easier life. Such a life reflected not needing to overextend one’s self by laboring solely to pay bills, at the sake of finding joy in other ways. This life echoes a resistance to the unkind, underpaid toil that many nondegreed, low-income Black men face. Such messages emerged in other participants’ accounts. Lucas offered a clear articulation of the role of college going in career and economic stability: The way I look at it is, if you graduate from high school and you don’t go to college, I mean there’s still maybe some jobs out there, but not jobs that are guaranteed or jobs that you really like. If you don’t go to college, if you just stop, you’re probably going to work in like McDonald’s or any fast food restaurant or jobs you don’t like, with low pay. That’s how I look at it.
Like King, who also used McDonald’s as a proxy for undesirable work, Lucas believed halting education after high school limited the likelihood of having access to career options that would bring enjoyment and better pay. Such a belief echoed sentiments garnered from his family members and undergirded his approach toward his own postsecondary future self.
Role Modeling and Messaging From Extended and Fictive Family
A third theme was that not only parents or other nuclear family members (e.g., siblings) but also extended family (e.g., uncles) and fictive kin (e.g., godparents) fostered participants’ postsecondary future selves. This theme revealed the common practice in both Black and Latino families to share child-nurturing responsibilities beyond the nuclear family as a way to collectively capitalize on shared knowledge. Perdido’s godmother was the only college graduate in his familial network. She had ample “college knowledge” and modeled how vital college was to securing the “better life” she achieved. Malik and Samuel discussed their uncles, neither of whom attended college, as instrumental in shaping their postsecondary future selves. Malik sought college for mechanical engineering and believed his uncle did this type of work. He described his uncle, a subway mechanic, noting: He used to work on the air conditioning and the electrical systems on the trains. . .I used to go to his job with him every once in a while. . .and I saw [his] little shop and all his tools, so that’s one thing that really inspired me. He’s a big inspiration, ’cause I work with him on his car.
Malik’s uncle influenced his nephew’s postsecondary future self, along the lines of college and career, by inspiring his interest in mechanical engineering. While his uncle was more of a mechanic and less an engineer, Malik’s desire to employ his math and science interests working with complex machinery was sparked by spending time working with his uncle.
Samuel planned to attend college to be a computer scientist and formed facets of his ideal postsecondary future self by observing his uncle, who thrived as a street vendor. Samuel noted: He works at a stand, and he loves his job because he’s his own boss. He can’t ever work with somebody over him. He hates that. So, he has his perfect job, and he just talked to me about this. He likes his job, so he wakes up every day in his life ready to go to work. He works on the weekends, too, and I’m just thinking I want a job that I want to really like, like I’m going to want to wake up to. So, I was looking at myself, and I like to work with people, so I have to work with people. That’s really fun to me.
Samuel’s uncle could neither offer “college knowledge” nor specific guidance on his nephew’s college and career ambitions. Yet, he role modeled other idyllic facets along the lines of career and life condition happiness or joy. Samuel threaded these notions together as ideal for his own postsecondary future self (e.g., waking up excited to work and working with people). Narratives from both Malik and Samuel also show how Black boys imagine postsecondary future selves in spite of racialized inopportunity. In the absence of same gender and race college and career role models, they drew from family members’ experiences to spark their desires for futures unseen.
Finding a Site to Imagine Postsecondary Future Selves
A fourth theme was that participants’ families made a concerted effort to influence their sons’ postsecondary future selves by choosing among numerous options to enroll them in a school where students’ futures were foregrounded. In a racially and economically stratified city, Black and Latino families struggled to keep their children from falling victim to the rampant academic failure and social strife present in some schools and stay clear of the type of street involvement that often leads to devastating outcomes. Black and Latino families relied on schools to provide their children not only a strong academic curriculum, but also supplemental services and other programs geared toward creating opportunities for a better future.
During the time of this study, there were 49 traditional public schools and 61 public charter schools that emphasized elements like hospitality, vocational, or technical training. Families chose Metro Collegiate for its success with an ethnically and racially diverse student population, its airy and colorful eco-friendly building, its 100% college-acceptance rate, and its safe reputation. As a public charter school, admission was free and open to all. However, with Metro’s popularity, it was not unusual for families to spend more than a year applying and re-applying to gain a coveted seat. Black and Latino families, especially those with future first-generation college goers, enrolled their children with the hopes Metro would complement familial priorities for their postsecondary future selves. Malik’s family was among the first to enroll in Metro upon its founding. Malik remarked: [My mom] liked it because how well my sister did when she was going here. She liked how she was successful. She was able to go to a different school and be even more successful. So she wanted me to be successful. It has a really good criteria for education.
To delve deeper, I asked Malik to elaborate more on what “good criteria for education” meant.
So, you said it has a good criteria for education. What do you mean by that?
’Cause there’s some schools that teachers don’t like really like help
you as much as the teachers here do. They would stay after school for as long as you need ’em to. They have workshops like during school hours if you need help. . .
Okay. So, you said that you think the other schools, they wouldn’t give you that?
Yeah, I know people, like in my family, who have gone to other schools, and sometimes it’s like the teachers aren’t as devoted to the students as they are here compared to what I’ve seen.
Malik’s mother chose Metro over other schools to shape her son’s postsecondary future self in part because of observations of family members who attended other city schools, where poor teaching was common and academic failure was more rampant for Black and Latino students. Teacher support for Malik’s academic success would increase his likelihood of going to college, thus Metro was a better option to ensure he actualized his postsecondary future self.
Families were also drawn to Metro because of safety concerns and for their child’s well-being. Participants often shared familial motivations to enroll at Metro by comparing it to their previous schools. Perdido, who enrolled in Metro’s middle school, described his former school as “savage,” slang for rough or wild. In his depiction, Perdido said, “a lot of people that came out of that school found another building they fell in love with (prison), if you know what I mean.” Here, Perdido referenced a literal school-to-prison pipeline his prior school crafted for its majority Black and Latina/o/x students, a school he depicted further as “it’s like if someone like, was gonna fight, they were gonna fight.” Given the racialized and gendered inequities framing criminal justice systems, the families of Black and Latino boys, especially, could not risk sending their children to unsafe schools that furthered the likelihood of ending up imprisoned.
However, concerns for their boys’ present safety sometimes conflicted with parental abilities to bolster elements of their children’s postsecondary future selves. After graduating from middle school, King left Metro to attend Lincoln, a traditional public high school that, unlike Metro, had a football team. He departed to play high school football, and his ambitions were to play at the collegiate and, ultimately, professional level. Although King’s father supported his son’s postsecondary athletic ambitions, his present life condition or safety was paramount. After King was involved in a large student brawl, his father unenrolled him mid-way through his 10th-grade year. King’s father then re-enrolled him in Metro, a safer, smaller option that provided college-oriented supports, even though there was no football team. This decision revealed his father’s devotion to King’s physical well-being and safety. It also offered King a lesson in what his family prioritized for his present and future. King was saddened to not play high school football; however, he knew his family’s commitment to his present safety trumped the risks associated with keeping him at Lincoln, better positioning him for his ambitious postsecondary future self. Hesitatingly, King internalized this choice as doing what was best for him. He noted, “I don’t want to go nowhere else . . . And it’s right up the street. I feel like I’m gonna get off task at any other school. I’m just gonna be out.” King’s self-appraisal revealed his need to stay at Metro to keep from getting distracted or being “out,” slang for unruly. In addition, Metro’s proximity to his home limited the distance he would have to travel, which also lessened the likelihood for getting caught up in interneighborhood disputes with rival or opposing proximal communities. Such was the reality for parents of Black boys like King. Metro’s academic reputation and safety appeared to drive parental decisions to choose this school for their sons so they could best imagine and take steps toward their postsecondary future selves.
Discussion
This ethnographic study drew from adolescent Black and Latino boys’ voices to determine how participants’ conceptualizations of their postsecondary future selves, along the lines of college, career, and condition, were shaped by their families (i.e., nuclear, extended, and fictive kin). Family members motivated participants with mostly abstract, yet impactful beliefs for finding success, having a future, becoming somebody, or having a plan, which the boys interpreted, given their own future interests. Although distinct domains (e.g., college, career, and condition), family members often encouraged one domain to emphasize another, or simultaneously in a sequential logic (e.g., go to college to get a desirable career to secure a fulfilling life condition). In addition, family members—including extended family and fictive kin—also role-modeled careers and elements of life conditions that participants interpreted and used to formulate conceptualizations of their own ideal postsecondary future selves. One way parents, in particular, shaped their sons’ postsecondary future selves was by enrolling them in a safe school that built their capacities for postsecondary education. Choosing Metro from an array of school options reinforced familial priorities, and revealed families’ baseline expectation that their child would obtain certain postsecondary futures.
Findings also reveal how oppressive mechanisms demarcate future opportunities for families and children due to their ethnicity, race, and low-income status. This is especially true for Black and Latino boys, who must imagine and enact futures past the negative, confining, and looming futures society often demands of them (e.g., imprisonment, low-paying labor; Carey, 2019b; Rios, 2011). Participants’ voices show how their families realized this forecast acutely and guided their sons’ futures purposefully. Yet, since participants in this study had few examples of the future lives their families hoped for, especially for college-based careers (see Turner, 2020), the boys enacted tremendous cognitive labor to piece together influences to envision what optimal postsecondary future selves would entail, and how to achieve them.
Findings also reveal that in the absence of specific college knowledge, families drew from their wisdom, experiences, and culturally rooted logics to foster their sons’ postsecondary future selves. Findings here challenge deficit notions of families of color from low-income contexts and reveal their wealth of embedded knowledge, the creativity with which it was conveyed, and how it was interpreted and employed by Black and Latino boys to obtain the types of thriving postsecondary futures society often denies them.
Among the factors that drove parents to Metro was its safety and emphasis on students’ futures, particularly for college going. In one example, King’s father re-enrolled his son at Metro because of his unwillingness to risk King’s safety by keeping him at Lincoln solely to boost his son’s chance of earning a lucrative college athletic scholarship (and perhaps a lucrative career). King’s account nuances prior work (Brody et al., 2006; Jenkins, 2020; Mandara, 2006) to show how families raising Black boys in contexts that pose high physical threat prioritize safety in ways that may trump, contradict, or re-orient supports for building their child’s capacity for attaining certain elements of their futures (i.e., athletics).
Findings also nuance notions of how family members convey their influence. With both words (e.g., verbal encouragements; Carey, 2016, 2021; George Mwangi et al., 2020; Martinez & Castellanos, 2018) and deeds (e.g., advocating and role-modeling life options; Carey, 2016, 2021; Chung et al., 1999; Cooper, 2007; Sánchez et al., 2006), family members fostered how the boys conceptualized their postsecondary future selves. However, for families, college, career, and condition were mutually reinforcing domains to achieve an ideal postsecondary future self. And, family members (not just parents) sought to ensure their children adopted this same logic.
Congruent to prior studies, participants in this study placed importance on getting a postsecondary education to avoid “getting nowhere” or “struggling” economically (Allen, 2015; Conchas & Vigil, 2012; Cooper, 2007; Huerta, 2015; Warren, 2017). However, this study revealed that participants neither interpreted their families as being “nowhere,” nor sought to “save their family” (Howard, 2014). Rather some understood their future role as fulfilling familial dashed dreams. Also, aligning with prior findings from Latino families, Lucas’s and Perdido’s parents prioritized educación, where good morals, avoiding trouble, and centering family, or familismo, reflected an ideal life condition (Auerbach, 2007; Torres et al., 2020; Valdés, 1996; Yowell, 2000). Moreover, like previous research (Halfond et al., 2012; Martinez & Castellanos, 2018; Pérez Huber et al., 2018), participants’ success was contingent on using their education to find a career that would spur pride and enjoyment, not undue financial or material gain. Recent research from Howard et al. (2019) has found that Black and Latino boys who deem themselves successful do so because they work hard, prioritize family and community, and seek self-improvement. Findings from this study build on these ideas, by showing how through modeling and messaging, families shape Black and Latino boys’ conceptualizations of present success and build their capacities for successful futures.
Undoubtedly, I approached this study with far clearer understandings of what college and career ambitions might mean for adolescents, as the literature is replete with evidence for how and why families foster these two prevalent domains in certain ways. Questioning participants to reveal how their families influenced elements of a “good life” or “better life” elicited some compelling insights into how achieving certain college and career goals would lead to fulfillment. Yet, participants mostly were unable to imagine or at least articulate an optimal life condition that did not center solely on educational or employment satisfaction. Missing from their postsecondary future selves were civic imaginings (Woodson, 2019), volunteerism, or even healthy recreation (e.g., physical exercise, mental wellness). Pleasurable or leisure activities, similar to their reported hobbies (e.g., most were into videogaming, skateboarding, or both) or anticipated interests, were not reported as salient to building an optimal postsecondary future self, one in which they could be “proud.” Perhaps given ethnic, racial, and economic marginalization, and pragmatic moorings to urge their sons to something “better” or “stable,” their families had limited freedom or energy to mold future imaginations of what a “flourishing life” (Grant, 2012)—their joy, their pleasure, or thriving—might look like.
Implications and Conclusion
The generalizability of findings from this study is limited because, among other things, this investigation was conducted with a small group of students at a college-going school, as opposed to a broader swath of participants at a comprehensive or vocational school. Yet achieving generalizability is less important for ethnographic research than determining how what was “learned in depth and richness . . . can be transferred to some extent to other situations or settings that are similar enough to warrant it” (O’Reilly, 2008, p. 24). And in many ways, the findings offer transferable insights to underscore the experiences of similar students in similar settings. For instance, this study’s participants represented typical Metro students. They shared the ethno/racial identities and socioeconomic status indicators of their Black and Latino school peers, grew up in a racially divided city, and imagined postsecondary future selves different from their present lives. Participants also reflected characteristics common of boys from their city. They shared linguistic styles, interests, tastes in clothing and music, and dwelled in communities rich with cultural resources, yet weakened by economic stratification that limited life possibilities. They also suffered the unique brand of dehumanization common for Black and Latino teen boys; they were deemed threatening on subways, followed in stores, and banned from lingering around transit hubs used widely by White commuters. While these and other experiences are common for Black and Latino boys in low-income communities, my intent here is to reveal the pervasive barriers that stifle their futures, not to essentialize the boys studied here or others locally or even globally. What emerged from this study holds transferable potential for understanding how other adolescent Black and Latino boys from low-income contexts, especially those attending schools similar to Metro, imagine, and actualize futures given the influence of their families. As such, both the concept of postsecondary future selves and the findings revealed herein offer researchers and educational stakeholders implications for future directions.
As researchers study the influences molding the college ambitions or career development of Black and Latino adolescents from low-income environments, they must be mindful of how families reinforce college, career, and also condition through an interwoven logic. When investigating adolescents’ post-high school ambitions through the lens of only one of these domains, researchers risk rendering a partial account of mutually reinforcing forces that inform how adolescents conceptualize and orient themselves toward their future. Researchers can investigate which of the three domains of postsecondary future selves matters more (e.g., career may be more salient) in influencing adolescent mindsets and behaviors regarding the others (e.g., students may envision their life condition, but misinterpret how to actualize such goals) and advocate for interventions that close gaps in their understandings. Relatedly, while I focus on family influences here, the postsecondary future selves heuristic of the 3Cs (i.e., college, career, and condition) offers researchers a holistic concept to employ in studies on other influences (e.g., media, neighborhood, peers), impacting how adolescents approach the future.
By centering familial influence on the future mindsets of adolescent Black and Latino boys in urban communities, I do not negate the role of educators and school policies. Assuredly, schools are both academically formative contexts and sites of “possibility” (Gibbs Grey, 2018), where postsecondary future selves are imagined and enacted. However, simply inserting “college knowledge” (Hooker & Brand, 2010) into programs and curricula is neither comprehensive nor developmentally appropriate (Savitz-Romer & Bouffard, 2012; Schneider & Stevenson, 1999). Instead, if schools are to be successful in fully supporting the postsecondary future selves of adolescents from marginalized communities, educators must develop programs that reinforce and thread the overlapping domains of college, career, and condition that youth absorb from home.
To form family-school bridges, educators must build on the knowledge that emerges from familial messaging and work with adolescents to concretize what they imagine and what families emphasize as optimal for their children’s future (Carey, 2016, 2021). In addition to supporting specific college and career outcomes, educators must develop programs to enable adolescents to determine what being a “success,” “having a future,” “having a plan,” or “becoming somebody,” means for themselves and families. Conversely, having concrete discussions with students about what “staying out of the system” means and avoiding living “paycheck to paycheck” would help Black and Latino boys build critical bridges between the positive futures they conceptualize and the realities of the ethnoracial oppression and economic stressors they navigate.
Urban school counselors and leaders should think more robustly about enacting precise college-going supports and career-awareness programs. Malik’s misunderstanding of what a mechanical engineer does demonstrates how Metro missed an opportunity to accurately mold his awareness of various careers to ensure he sought the proper postsecondary educational pathway. Moreover, instead of focusing on college and career as separate domains, educators can build students’ efficacy for threading linkages between college and college majors, career trajectories, and expected life condition as aligned pursuits, to complement family-based supports.
Educators must also inspire Black and Latino adolescent boys to boldly imagine robust versions of their postsecondary future selves. Beyond college and career, condition offers space for them to envision flourishing, thriving lives that are not tied solely to financially-driven labor outcomes. Optimal postsecondary future selves should be hallmarked by expected civic engagement and endeavors beyond work that compel joy and fulfillment in their lives.
It is this joy, this fulfillment, this seemingly evasive future “better life” that Black and Latino families yearn for and motivate their children to find. While college and career are key, they are yet touchstones in the life course. Futures hallmarked by only educational or career pursuits make up a portion of a fully actualized life. Moving from narrow, confining college and career readiness projects to the liberating potential couched within postsecondary future selves demands shifts in how stakeholders create contexts for adolescents to imagine, to hope for, and to plan bold lives for themselves. Thus, I call for researchers and educators to conceive of more developmentally appropriate, creative, and family-responsive programs and pedagogies that help adolescents better dream what their postsecondary future selves could be.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author extends his sincere appreciation to Ashley Woodson, Kari Kokka, Tanner LeBaron Wallace, Amy Binder, Camila Polanco, and the reviewers and editorial team at the Journal of Adolescent Research for their helpful insights and suggested edits on earlier formulations of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
