| dc.description.abstract | Purpose: The purpose of this study has been to investigate the significance of immigrant background on
orientation towards higher education in context of gender and socioeconomic background. An additional
purpose has been to investigate the significance of having experienced hateful comments based on
minority background in connection to orientation towards higher education for adolescents with immigrant
background. Furthermore, if this significance is gendered. A last question being elucidated is to what
degree expectations of future unemployment interrelates to orientation towards higher education for males
and females with immigrant background.
Methods: The article is based on quantitative data from the Ung i Oslo 2018 (Young in Oslo 2018) study. It
is a cross-sectional study with a sample of 9005 adolescents attending secondary schooling. Two sets of
linear multiple regressions stratified by gender have been performed, one for the entire sample, and one for
only adolescents with immigrant background.
Results: 1) Adolescents with immigrant background expect to attend higher education more frequently
when comparing to adolescents with the same grade level and socioeconomic background. 2) There is no
significant difference between males and females regarding the significance of immigrant background for
orientation towards higher education. 3) Socioeconomic background has significantly smaller impact for
adolescents with immigrant background. 4) Receiving hateful comments based on minority background
has no significance in interrelation with orientation towards higher education, for neither females nor males.
In addition, expectations of future unemployment does not affect for males with immigrant background, but
for females with immigrant background there was found a negative relationship between expecting
unemployment and orientation towards higher education.
Conclusion: Adolescents with immigrant background value education despite lower socioeconomic status
and weaker performance in school. Such “immigrant drive” seemingly appears to be fairly robust, across
genders. The analyses also show how family socioeconomic status has somewhat less of an impact on
adolescents with immigrant background’s orientation towards higher education. Internally in the
adolescents with immigrant background-group experiencing negative comments related to ethnicity and
religion has little impact on orientation towards higher education. Controlling for being born in Norway
makes the “immigrant drive” even more apparent, especially for males | en |
