Publication: Dreams and Barriers: Aspirations, Expectations, and Schooling Outcomes of Indonesian Students
Loading...
Date
2022-12
ISSN
Published
2022-12
Author(s)
Johnson, Hillary C.
Editor(s)
Abstract
High aspirations for their future motivate youth to strive toward them and achieve better outcomes. However, the influence of perceived constraints on the motivational power of is unclear: do high aspirations motivate independently of constraints or only when expected constraints seem workable This paper explores this question with a gender lens and using a large, cross-sectional survey of adolescent students in Indonesia. The findings show that most students aspire to high education levels, but only half of the students expect to complete the level to which they aspire. Although girls have higher aspirations than boys, girls are less likely to expect to achieve their aspirations. Years of aspired education are strongly correlated with better current schooling outcomes (grades and attendance), and while expectations are also associated with better schooling outcomes, the relationship is nonlinear. Aspirations seem to motivate students despite their perceived constraints, unless there is a large gap between their aspirations and expectations. Although there are similar patterns for boys and girls, aspirations are more correlated with boys’ attendance, and expectations are more strongly related to boys’ grades and attendance. Students cite both mental barriers and economic constraints to achieving their aspirations, especially the latter for girls. The results suggest that both male and female Indonesian students could benefit from programs that boost aspirations and address psychological and economic constraints.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Johnson, Hillary C.; Muller, Noël. 2022. Dreams and Barriers: Aspirations, Expectations, and Schooling Outcomes of Indonesian Students. Policy Research Working Papers;10267. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/38425 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.Publication Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22)Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Adults’ Cognitive and Socioemotional Skills and their Labor Market Outcomes in Colombia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-09)Previous research has shown that people with higher cognitive skills (mental abilities) and socioemotional skills (behaviors and personality) get better labor market outcomes. It is unclear, however, if this conclusion applies to low- and middle-income countries, given that existing literature builds on studies that are dominantly about highincome countries. In this paper, we explore how cognitive and socioemotional skills of adults, ages 15–64, relate to their labor market outcomes in the context of Colombia. Controlling for a range of confounding factors in a crosssectional survey, we do find that adults with higher skills also have better outcomes, while cognitive and socioemotional skills correlate with different ones and seemingly through different channels. Adults with higher cognitive skills have better jobs (with higher earnings, more formal, and highskilled) and are more likely to complete tertiary education. Socioemotional skills correlate more modestly with having a better job but more strongly with labor market participation and tertiary-education completion. Results suggest that adults with both cognitive and socioemotional skills tend to do better in the labor market and that policies boosting the development of both types may be beneficial in Colombia.Publication Why Do Indonesian Adolescent Boys Have Poorer Schooling Outcomes than Girls?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11)Indonesian secondary students perform worse academically than their peers in other countries, especially boys. In the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, Indonesia ranked among the worse of the 72 participating countries. More than half of 15-year-olds could read a text but could not answer simple questions related to it; that was only the case of 14 percent of students in high-performing Vietnam and 20 percent in member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). While Indonesian boys and girls had similar average scores in math and science, girls outperformed boys in average scores of reading.Publication Born with a Silver Spoon : Inequality in Educational Achievement across the World(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-01)This paper assesses inequality of opportunity in educational achievement using the Human Opportunity Index methodology on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment. The findings suggest that there are large inequalities in learning outcomes as measured by demonstrated proficiency in Programme for International Student Assessment test scores in math, reading, and science. Differences in wealth, parental education, and area of residence explain a bulk of this inequality in most of the countries in the sample. Consistent with what has been documented previously in the literature, the paper also finds a strong and stable correlation between inequality of opportunity and public spending on school education. An exploration of the changes in inequality of opportunity between the 2009 and 2012 rounds of the Programme for International Student Assessment, using parametric and nonparametric techniques, suggests that there has been little progress.Publication Giving Children a Better Start : Preschool Attendance and School-Age Profiles(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-06)The authors study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary places. Using a within household estimator, they find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that magnify as children grow up. By age 15, treated children have accumulated 0.8 extra years of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared with their untreated siblings. Instrumental variables estimates that control for nonrandom selection of siblings into preschool lead to similar results. The authors speculate that early grade repetition harms subsequent school progression and that pre-primary education appears as a successful policy option to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences.Publication India Shining and Bharat Drowning : Comparing Two Indian States to the Worldwide Distribution in Mathematics Achievement(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 of the 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5 percent of children rank higher than the bottom 5 percent in only three countries-South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. But not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score distribution for both states is next only to South Africa in the worldwide ranking exercise. Consequently, and to the extent that these two states can represent India, the two statements "for every ten top performers in the United States there are four in India" and "for every ten low performers in the United States there are two hundred in India" are both consistent with the data. The combination of India's size and large variance in achievement give both the perceptions that India is shining even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning. Comparable estimates of inequalities in learning are the building blocks for substantive research on the correlates of earnings inequality in India and other low-income countries; the methods proposed here allow for independent testing exercises to build up such data by linking scores to internationally comparable tests.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication South Asia Development Update, April 2025: Taxing Times(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-23)Growth prospects for South Asia have dimmed. The global economic environment has become more challenging and is a source of heightened downside risks. After a decade of repeated disruptions, South Asia’s buffers to cushion new shocks are slim. Tackling some of its greatest inefficiencies and vulnerabilities could help South Asia navigate this unusually uncertain outlook: unproductive agricultural sectors, dependence on energy imports, pressures from rising global temperatures, and fragile fiscal positions. For most South Asian countries, increased revenue mobilization is a prerequisite for strengthening fiscal positions. Even taking into account the particular challenges of collecting taxes in South Asian economies—such as widespread informal economic activity and large agriculture sectors—South Asian economies face larger tax gaps than the average emerging market and developing economy (EMDE). This suggests the need for improved tax policy and administration. Until fiscal positions have strengthened, the burden of climate adaptation will disproportionately fall on the private sector. If allowed sufficient flexibility, private sector adaptation could offset about one-third of the likely climate damage by 2050. This may, however, require governments to remove obstacles that prevent workers and firms from moving across locations and activities. As growth prospects dim, the challenge grows to create jobs for South Asia’s rapidly expanding working-age population. South Asia’s large diasporas could become a source of strength if their knowledge, networks, and other resources can be better tapped for investment and trade.Publication Business Ready 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03)Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.Publication Leveraging Islamic Fintech to Improve Financial Inclusion(World Bank, Kuala Lumpur, 2020-10)Islamic finance is a fast-booming segment of global finance. Serving a core population of 1.8 billion Muslims world-wide and a wider global ethical finance audience, its role is growing in global significance especially as it relates to global social financing needs. The global fintech revolution is having a similar impact for Islamic finance through the evolution of a nascent Islamic fintech ecosystem. The purpose of this report is to evaluate the global developments in the area of fintech solutions by Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) and its impact on financial inclusion within its core markets. The core audience of this report are financial services institution leadership, and government policymakers, especially across the core markets of Islamic finance.Publication Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-05)Digitalization is the transformational opportunity of our time. The digital sector has become a powerhouse of innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Value added in the IT services sector grew at 8 percent annually during 2000–22, nearly twice as fast as the global economy. Employment growth in IT services reached 7 percent annually, six times higher than total employment growth. The diffusion and adoption of digital technologies are just as critical as their invention. Digital uptake has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1.5 billion new internet users added from 2018 to 2022. The share of firms investing in digital solutions around the world has more than doubled from 2020 to 2022. Low-income countries, vulnerable populations, and small firms, however, have been falling behind, while transformative digital innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) have been accelerating in higher-income countries. Although more than 90 percent of the population in high-income countries was online in 2022, only one in four people in low-income countries used the internet, and the speed of their connection was typically only a small fraction of that in wealthier countries. As businesses in technologically advanced countries integrate generative AI into their products and services, less than half of the businesses in many low- and middle-income countries have an internet connection. The growing digital divide is exacerbating the poverty and productivity gaps between richer and poorer economies. The Digital Progress and Trends Report series will track global digitalization progress and highlight policy trends, debates, and implications for low- and middle-income countries. The series adds to the global efforts to study the progress and trends of digitalization in two main ways: · By compiling, curating, and analyzing data from diverse sources to present a comprehensive picture of digitalization in low- and middle-income countries, including in-depth analyses on understudied topics. · By developing insights on policy opportunities, challenges, and debates and reflecting the perspectives of various stakeholders and the World Bank’s operational experiences. This report, the first in the series, aims to inform evidence-based policy making and motivate action among internal and external audiences and stakeholders. The report will bring global attention to high-performing countries that have valuable experience to share as well as to areas where efforts will need to be redoubled.