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Planning for the American Dream: The College-Savings Behavior of Asian and Latino Foreign-Born Parents in the United States

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Abstract

Rapid growth in the population of children of immigrants has occurred during an era of soaring college costs in the United States. Despite well-established knowledge that immigrant parents hold high educational expectations for their children and that children of immigrants will make up a large share of the U.S. college-aged population, little is known about how immigrant families prepare financially for their children’s postsecondary education. We use data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to examine the patterns and predictors of college savings behavior among Asian and Latino foreign-born parents of high school students in the United States. Relative to white U.S.-born parents, Asian immigrant parents have higher odds of saving and have more money saved for their 10th-grader’s college education. In contrast, Latino immigrant parents are less likely than white U.S.-born parents to save for their children’s college education. However, among parents who save, Latino immigrant parents do not differ from white U.S.-born parents in the amount saved. For both Asian and Latino immigrant parents, income is less predictive of saving than it is for white U.S.-born parents, and the odds of saving increase with U.S. experience. Findings improve understanding of college access and the long-term socioeconomic prospects of children of immigrants in the U.S.

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Notes

  1. Eliminating these students from our sample did not affect our results. We estimated alternate models with these students included in the nonsaving group and obtain results consistent with those presented here. In addition, students whose parents did not expect them to obtain any postsecondary education did not differ significantly on any of the covariates.

  2. We found that results from regression analyses using imputed values for the missing cases on the dependent variable “any efforts to save” are substantively identical to the analyses shown in the manuscript with these cases dropped.

  3. Analyses using family income as a series of dummy variables for each interval resulted in substantively identical findings. Analyses using the midpoint of each interval as the income variable also resulted in similar results.

  4. Because of potential endogeneity between parent’s location preferences and savings behavior, we also ran models without the location preference variable included and obtained nearly identical results.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support from the following grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Health and Child Development: R24 HD041025 and T32 HD007514, awarded to the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University, and R24 HD042849 and T32 HD007081, awarded to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The opinions reflected are our own and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies or the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20015-8072, USA

    Molly Dondero

  2. Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, 1200 E. Anderson Lane, Austin, TX, 78752, USA

    Melissa Humphries

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  1. Molly Dondero
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Correspondence to Molly Dondero.

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Dondero, M., Humphries, M. Planning for the American Dream: The College-Savings Behavior of Asian and Latino Foreign-Born Parents in the United States. Popul Res Policy Rev 35, 791–823 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-016-9409-x

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