Catching up with Grace Kao

Click here for our interview with Grace Kao.

In this installment of our Scholar Interview Series, we spoke with Dr. Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, about her 1998 AJE article “Educational Aspirations of Minority Youth” as well as her research on immigrant education and future directions for the field. Dr. Kao’s findings that Black and Hispanic youth are less able to translate their high educational aspirations into attainment still holds today, and she suggests part of the gap is due to inconsistently high expectations among these students. She also points to socio-economic inequalities as an important factor in explaining the attainment gap. She also shared her immigrant education scholarship and illustrated the continuing importance of immigrant optimism with an example from her more recent work on immigrants in Spain. Interview by Katie Reed and Emily Crawford.