The Impact of Teachers' Expectations on Students'Educational Opportunities in the Life Course

The substantial aim of this paper is to integrate the main idea of 'Pygmalion' orself-fullling prophecy research (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968; Jussim and Har-ber, 2005) into the general subjective expected utility framework about inequalityin educational opportunities (Breen and Goldthorpe, 1997; Esser, 1999). In thetheoretical section, a formal model of the impact of self-fullling prophecies oneducational transitions is developed. In the empirical section, we test this modelto predict both students' educational success (in terms of high school graduation)and their university transitions. Since we assume a conditional dependence of theseoutcomes, we control for sample selection bias (Heckman, 1979). We nd that inour operationalization of self-fullling prophecies the latter show signicant eectson both educational success and university transitions. However, while the resultsremain stable in case of educational success, we nd that the conditional decisionproblem of university transitions leads to a selection bias for the estimates in thelatter case. In a sensitivity analysis we nd that only if unobserved heterogene-ity would be disturbingly high, it could also aect the stability of self-fulllingprophecy estimates.