objective factors that narrow or enlarge the adolescent's opportunity to choose to go to college, more allusive and subtle motivational variables play on the decision, producing surprises and creating slippage in predictions based strictly on more accessible and objective factors. This is the level of analysis we reach for when puzzles and paradoxes confront us: the gifted child of middle-class parents who wants to be a jazz saxaphonist and shows no interest in academic training, the boy of only middling-high intelligence who wins high grades and election to Phi Beta Kappa, the son of Italian immigrants who finishes medical school despite what seem insurmountable financial problems. Cases like these, the traditional delight of moralists and ideologists, are provocative to the psychologist as well. They demand explanation, it seems, on motivational grounds.We have little systematic information about the decision to go to college. The current renaissance of research on the college student has not concentrated on determinants of college-going, and the older studies either focused on objective determinants like family income and residence or stirred motivational variables into one pot with these so that it is impossible to say anything very clear about the independent operation of either type of factor.There are some exceptions to this general state of affairs. Havighurst (1957) has demonstrated the force of peer values in determining whether lower-class youths decide to go to college. Kahl's carefully designed study (1953) shows that in the lower-middle class, some subtle 199
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