Monitoring the Future Survey/Education Expectations and Aspirations Scale

1. Abstract

The Monitoring the Future Survey/Education Expectations and Aspirations Scale (MTF-EEAS) is a standardized psychometric battery developed by Lloyd D. Johnston, Jerald G. Bachman, and Patrick M. O’Malley at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Designed as an integral module of the landmark national Monitoring the Future epidemiological study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the instrument assesses subjective probability estimates and personal ambitions regarding five critical postsecondary trajectories: vocational/technical training, armed services enlistment, two-year associate degree completion, four-year baccalaureate graduation, and post-baccalaureate graduate or professional study. Composed of five items evaluated on a balanced four-point ordinal response scale ranging from 1 (Definitely won’t) to 4 (Definitely will), the scale captures the structural transition from subjective academic aspirations to realistic educational expectations during late adolescence.

Extensive psychometric investigations across decades of nationally representative cohort samples (comprising 8th, 10th, and 12th-grade secondary school students) demonstrate high predictive utility, robust criterion validity, and stable measurement properties over historical epochs. While frequently analyzed as discrete single-item behavioral indices to differentiate divergent occupational paths, the collegiate items (two-year, four-year, and graduate school trajectories) demonstrate satisfactory composite internal consistency (ω = .78 to .84; α = .76 to .82). The instrument reliably forecasts actual postsecondary educational attainment over multi-decade longitudinal panels and exhibits established negative associations with adolescent risk behaviors, including illicit substance use and cigarette smoking, while serving as a robust protective factor against academic disengagement. This article provides a comprehensive evaluation of the instrument’s psychometric architecture, theoretical foundations in status attainment and expectancy-value models, construct validity, factorial invariance, scoring configurations, and administrative parameters.

2. Keywords

Monitoring the Future, MTF-EEAS, educational expectations, academic aspirations, postsecondary attainment, status attainment theory, expectancy-value theory, adolescent development, psychometrics, longitudinal tracking, educational sociology, vocational pathways

3. Authors

The Monitoring the Future Survey and its educational expectation modules were conceptualized, standardized, and sustained by principal investigators at the Survey Research Center within the Institute for Social Research (ISR), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States:

• Lloyd D. Johnston, Ph.D. — Distinguished Senior Research Scientist and Research Professor Emeritus, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
• Patrick M. O’Malley, Ph.D. — Research Professor Emeritus, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
• Jerald G. Bachman, Ph.D. — Research Professor Emeritus, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Institutional Contact and Archive:
Monitoring the Future Project
Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2321, USA
Email: [email protected] | Website: monitoringthefuture.org

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the MTF-EEAS is to quantify secondary school students’ perceived likelihood of engaging in and completing specific post-high school pathways. In youth epidemiology and developmental psychology, understanding an adolescent’s orientation toward the future is vital for modeling transition dynamics into early adulthood. Adolescence represents a sensitive developmental period characterized by identity exploration, formal operational planning, and the crystallization of vocational and educational goals. The MTF-EEAS provides researchers, policy analysts, and educators with an efficient, highly sensitive metric designed to capture both the directionality and strength of an adolescent’s postsecondary commitments.

In clinical, developmental, and prevention research, educational expectations function as key indicators of social bonding and behavioral self-regulation. According to social control theories and positive youth development frameworks, adolescents who project high subjective probabilities onto baccalaureate and graduate educational milestones maintain a psychological “stake in conformity.” Consequently, the scale is deployed extensively to predict and mitigate adolescent health-compromising behaviors, including:

• Binge drinking and polysubstance abuse
• Truancy, early school leaving, and academic underperformance
• Juvenile delinquency and externalizing conduct disorders
• Anhedonia, developmental amotivation, and internalizing distress

Beyond risk mitigation, the scale serves as a standardized outcome and tracking mechanism in macro-level sociological and educational studies. It enables researchers to evaluate demographic disparities across racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender strata, document temporal trends across generational cohorts (e.g., Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z), and evaluate the long-term effectiveness of systemic educational interventions such as college prep curricula, vocational apprenticeships, and financial aid expansion policies.

5. Psychological Construct

The MTF-EEAS operationalizes the multidimensional construct of postsecondary educational orientation, delineating between theoretical aspirations (what an individual idealizes or desires to attain under unconstrained circumstances) and practical expectations (what an individual realistically plans to execute given perceived structural barriers, academic readiness, and financial realities). By employing the prompt phrase “How likely is it that you will do each of the following things after high school?”, the scale explicitly targets cognitive expectations—subjective probability estimates reflecting reasoned appraisal rather than unanchored fantasy.

The instrument encompasses five discrete postsecondary trajectories, reflecting distinct institutional avenues:

• Technical or Vocational School (Item 1): Assesses orientation toward non-baccalaureate, sub-baccalaureate credentials, technical trades, and specialized occupational apprenticeships. This pathway represents high vocational specificity and targeted labor-market entry, attracting youth oriented toward immediate applied skills rather than generalized collegiate curricula.
• Armed Forces (Item 2): Measures subjective expectations of military enlistment. Psychometrically, military enlistment represents an alternative institution that provides structured social mobility, occupational training, and educational benefits (such as the G.I. Bill), frequently operating independently from traditional academic tracks.
• Two-Year College Program (Item 3): Captures perceived probability of entering and graduating from community colleges, technical colleges, or junior colleges conferring associate degrees. In empirical research, this item captures both intermediate academic ambitions and terminal technical education, reflecting either a steppingstone toward a four-year degree or a distinct vocational credential.
• Four-Year College Program (Item 4): Evaluates the subjective expectation of earning a bachelor’s degree (B.A., B.S.). In modern status attainment models, baccalaureate attainment is recognized as the foundational baseline for elite occupational entry, knowledge-economy careers, and sustained upward socioeconomic mobility.
• Graduate or Professional School (Item 5): Measures ambitious aspirations toward post-baccalaureate academic or professional degrees (e.g., M.A., M.S., Ph.D., M.D., J.D.). This dimension evaluates long-range academic persistence, advanced intellectual specialization, and high human capital commitment extending deep into the third decade of life.

Crucially, the scale does not treat these trajectories as mutually exclusive forced choices. A respondent can register high expectations for both a two-year college and a four-year college (reflecting a transfer trajectory), or high expectations for military service alongside vocational schooling. This non-ipsative, rating-scale format allows the MTF-EEAS to capture blended, nonlinear, and multi-stage educational trajectories that characterize modern educational pathways.

6. Theoretical Framework

The MTF-EEAS is situated at the intersection of classical sociological status attainment models and cognitive-developmental motivation theories. Three foundational frameworks elucidate the psychological mechanisms measured by the scale:

1. The Wisconsin Model of Status Attainment

Formulated by William H. Sewell, Archibald O. Haller, and Alejandro Portes (1969), the Wisconsin Model expanded upon Blau and Duncan’s structural stratification paradigm by integrating social-psychological mediator variables. The model posits that objective socioeconomic background (e.g., parental education, parental occupational status, family income) and native academic ability do not translate directly into adult occupational prestige. Rather, their influence is mediated through the social influence of significant others (parents, teachers, peers) and the adolescent’s internalized educational and occupational aspirations. In this framework, the MTF-EEAS measures the cognitive crystallization of an adolescent’s status aspirations, serving as the psychological linchpin that translates background resources into adult educational attainment.

2. Expectancy-Value Theory of Achievement Motivation

Developed by Jacquelynne Eccles, Allan Wigfield, and colleagues (Eccles et al., 1983; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), the Expectancy-Value Theory posits that achievement-related performance, persistence, and major life choices are directly predicted by two primary cognitive evaluations: individuals’ expectancies for success (how confident they are that they can successfully execute a task) and the subjective task value (how important, useful, or intrinsically satisfying the task is perceived to be). The MTF-EEAS directly taps the expectancy component by prompting respondents for subjective probabilities (Definitely won’t to Definitely will). Under this framework, an adolescent’s score reflects an internal calculus balancing perceived personal agency, past academic performance, domain self-efficacy, and perceived environmental affordances or barriers.

3. Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT)

Rooted in Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, Lent, Brown, and Hackett (1994) formulated Social Cognitive Career Theory to explain how academic and career interests develop, how educational choices are forged, and how performance outcomes are achieved. SCCT highlights the triadic reciprocal interaction among self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and personal goals. Within SCCT, the MTF-EEAS items represent specific, domain-targeted distal goal intentions that direct self-regulatory mechanisms, guide sustained study behaviors, and buffer adolescents against competing distractions or risky behavioral alternatives.

7. Validity

The validity of the MTF-EEAS has been extensively documented through five decades of national epidemiological monitoring involving hundreds of thousands of American students, supported by longitudinal follow-ups across the adult lifespan.

Predictive Validity

The predictive validity of the scale is robust. Long-term longitudinal follow-up panels conducted by the Monitoring the Future study—which track sub-samples of 12th graders via biennial mailed surveys and online assessments up to age 50 and beyond (Bachman et al., 2008; Schulenberg et al., 2016)—consistently establish that 12th-grade responses on Item 4 (“Graduate from a college [four-year program]”) and Item 5 (“Attend graduate or professional school after college”) are among the strongest individual-level predictors of actual degree completion. Adolescents endorsing “Definitely will” on Item 4 graduate with a baccalaureate degree within six years at rates exceeding 70%, compared to under 10% among those responding “Definitely won’t” or “Probably won’t”. Similarly, Item 2 (military enlistment) demonstrates substantial predictive validity for actual service branch enlistment records obtained during emerging adulthood.

Construct and Convergent Validity

The MTF-EEAS exhibits strong convergent validity with established academic metrics:

• Academic Performance: Responses to Item 4 and Item 5 correlate positively with self-reported high school grade point average (GPA; Pearson r = .38 to .46) and standardized test achievement scores (e.g., SAT/ACT composite scores; r = .40 to .50).
• Parental Socioeconomic Status: Items 4 and 5 correlate moderately with parental education levels (r = .30 to .38), supporting status attainment theoretical postulates.
• Academic Self-Concept: Collegiate items demonstrate positive associations with measures of academic self-concept and school bonding (r = .35 to .45).

Criterion and Divergent Validity (Health-Risk Behaviors)

A central utility of the scale within the NIDA research paradigm is its capacity to discriminate between youth at risk for health-compromising behaviors and those protected from them. Landmark epidemiological reports (Johnston et al., 2001, 2020) show an inverse relationship between four-year college expectations and substance use:

• High school seniors reporting “Definitely will” graduate from a four-year college exhibit significantly lower 30-day prevalence rates of cigarette smoking, illicit drug use (e.g., methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine), and heavy daily alcohol consumption relative to peers with low college expectations.
• Conversely, individuals with high collegiate expectations report elevated rates of heavy episodic (“binge”) drinking during the subsequent transition into university environments, confirming nuanced developmental patterns documented by developmental psychopathology frameworks.
• Vocational and military pathway expectations (Items 1 and 2) diverge systematically from traditional four-year academic paths, displaying unique correlations with employment-seeking behaviors, practical interest profiles, and specific geographic demographic factors.

8. Reliability

The evaluation of the MTF-EEAS’s reliability requires distinguishing between composite multi-item scales and individual pathway indicators, given the distinct functional roles of the five items.

Internal Consistency

When the academic items (Item 3: Two-year college, Item 4: Four-year college, Item 5: Graduate/professional school) are aggregated into a composite index reflecting General Higher Education Orientation, internal consistency estimates across large-scale MTF secondary school cohorts consistently yield acceptable to good parameters:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Ranging from .76 to .82 across varying grade cohorts (8th, 10th, and 12th grades).
• McDonald’s Omega (ω_t): Ranging from .78 to .84, confirming robust total composite reliability without relying on the restrictive assumption of tau-equivalence.

When Item 4 (four-year) and Item 5 (graduate school) are modeled as a bivariate indicator of Advanced Academic Aspirations, the inter-item correlation typically ranges between r = .58 and .66 (Spearman-Brown reliability coefficient ≈ .73 to .80), indicating high psychometric cohesion between expectations of undergraduate and post-graduate attainment.

Test-Retest Stability

Short-term test-retest reliability across 3-to-4-week administration intervals within school-based validation sub-studies yields intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) between .81 and .88 for the four-year college item, and between .74 and .81 for vocational and military items. Long-term longitudinal stability across high school transitions displays developmental maturation:

• Stability coefficients from 8th to 10th grade: r = .52 to .60
• Stability coefficients from 10th to 12th grade: r = .64 to .72

This progressive increase in rank-order stability reflects the normative consolidation of realistic educational expectations as adolescents approach high school completion.

9. Factor Analysis

Structural evaluations of the MTF-EEAS using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) demonstrate that the five items do not represent a single unidimensional continuum. Rather, they reflect differentiated, multi-pathway career orientations.

Factor Structure and Model Fit

CFA investigations evaluating competing structural models across national samples routinely show that a two-factor oblique model or a tripartite pathway model provides superior fit over a unidimensional model (which yields poor fit: CFI < .80, RMSEA > .12). The tripartite structural configuration separates postsecondary orientation into three distinct structural latent factors:

• Factor 1: Collegiate / Academic Pathway — Defined by Item 4 (Four-year college) and Item 5 (Graduate/professional school), with secondary shared loading from Item 3 (Two-year college).
• Factor 2: Applied Vocational Pathway — Defined primarily by Item 1 (Technical or vocational school) and shared variance with Item 3 (Two-year college).
• Factor 3: Military Service Pathway — Defined by Item 2 (Armed forces), functioning primarily as a standalone orthogonal or slightly negative trajectory relative to collegiate study.

Representative CFA Parameter Estimates

In standard structural equation modeling based on MTF 12th-grade cohorts (e.g., sample sizes exceeding N = 12,000 per cohort wave), a representative two-factor model distinguishing Academic Higher Education (Items 3, 4, 5) from Alternative/Vocational Pathways (Items 1, 2) produces the following standardized parameter estimates:

Overall model fit indices for this multidimensional specification consistently demonstrate strong empirical adequacy: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .972, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .955, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .041 (90% CI [.037, .046]), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .029. Cross-group measurement invariance analyses confirm full metric and scalar invariance across biological sex and invariant factor patterns across multiple decades of historical data collection.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Standardized self-report rating scale / survey module; paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire administration.
• Target Population: Adolescents and emerging adults; primarily calibrated for 8th, 10th, and 12th-grade secondary school students (approximate age range: 13–19 years).
• Item Format: Five concise behavioral/attainment statements evaluating discrete postsecondary options.
• Response Format: Balanced 4-point ordinal response scale:
  • 1 = Definitely won’t
  • 2 = Probably won’t
  • 3 = Probably will
  • 4 = Definitely will
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes as part of a multi-construct survey battery.
• Scoring and Operationalization Schemes:
  • Independent Item Profiling (Standard MTF Protocol): Items 1 through 5 are analyzed as separate ordinal variables (values 1 to 4), allowing distinct modeling of divergent pathways (e.g., military vs. four-year university).
  • Binary Cutoff / High Expectation Indicator: Items are frequently dichotomized for demographic and epidemiological trend reporting into “High Expectation” (Definitely will = 1) versus “Lower/Ambivalent Expectation” (Definitely won’t, Probably won’t, Probably will = 0), or (Probably will / Definitely will = 1) versus others.
  • Collegiate Orientation Composite: Items 4 and 5 (or Items 3, 4, and 5) are summed or averaged to create an overarching academic aspiration score ranging from 1.00 to 4.00, where higher scores signify elevated collegiate commitment.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Initial Publication and Standardization Year: 1975 (inaugural Monitoring the Future senior cohort); formally documented in technical core measure recommendations and NIDA annual monographs (e.g., Johnston, O’Malley, & Bachman, 2001).
• Copyright Status and Public Domain Access: Developed under research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) (grants R01DA001411, R01DA016575). As a federally funded measurement instrument developed by researchers at the University of Michigan, the scale items reside in the public domain and are freely accessible for scholarly, scientific, and educational research purposes.
• Usage Fees: No licensing fees, commercial royalties, or per-administration charges are required for academic research applications.
• Access and Archival Repository: Standardized documentation, codebooks, and raw multi-cohort survey data files are deposited annually for public and restricted scholarly access at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) within the National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP).

12. References

• Bachman, J. G., O’Malley, P. M., Schulenberg, J. E., Johnston, L. D., Freedman-Doan, P., & Messersmith, E. E. (2008). The education-drug use connection: How successes and failures in school relate to adolescent smoking, drinking, drug use, and delinquency. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates / Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203837955
• Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. (2001). Core Measures Initiative Phase I Recommendations (pp. 120–121). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
• Eccles, J. S., Adler, T. F., Futterman, R., Goff, S. B., Kaczala, C. M., Meece, J. L., & Midgley, C. (1983). Expectancies, values, and academic behaviors. In J. T. Spence (Ed.), Achievement and achievement motivation (pp. 75–146). W. H. Freeman.
• Johnston, L. D., O’Malley, P. M., & Bachman, J. G. (2001). Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2000: Volume I, Secondary school students (NIH Publication No. 01-4924). National Institute on Drug Abuse. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED458462
• Johnston, L. D., Miech, R. A., O’Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., Schulenberg, J. E., & Patrick, M. E. (2020). Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2019: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use. Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan. https://doi.org/10.3998/2027.42/150622
• Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., & Hackett, G. (1994). Toward a unifying social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice, and performance. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 45(1), 79–122. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1994.1027
• Schulenberg, J. E., Johnston, L. D., O’Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., Miech, R. A., & Patrick, M. E. (2016). High school educational expectations and subsequent substance use among U.S. young adults: A national longitudinal study. Development and Psychopathology, 28(4pt1), 1105–1123. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579416000730
• Sewell, W. H., Haller, A. O., & Portes, A. (1969). The educational and early occupational attainment process. American Sociological Review, 34(1), 82–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092789
• Wigfield, A., & Eccles, J. S. (2000). Expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 68–81. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1015

13. Items of the Scale