Community colleges are the quiet backbone of American higher education. They enroll millions of students each year and absorb a disproportionate share of first-generation, lower-income and academically underprepared learners, yet the literature on STEM persistence has been built overwhelmingly on four-year campuses. A National Academies report on two-year and four-year STEM degrees has argued that these diverse pathways deserve systemic attention, and earlier work has shown that “STEM momentum” — the pace at which community college students accumulate STEM credits — predicts who ultimately reaches a baccalaureate in a STEM field. The new analysis reaches further back than most studies bother to look. Using data that begin in ninth grade, it treats the community college not as the start of a career story but as one relay point in a longer transmission: high school aspiration, two-year coursework, and finally the occupational experiences students report three years after high school. The question is how much of that signal survives each handoff.

The study’s theoretical engine is Social Cognitive Career Theory, introduced by Robert Lent, Steven Brown and Gail Hackett in 1994, which recasts career choice as a learning problem rather than a personality-matching exercise. The theory holds that career behavior is driven by three interacting components: self-efficacy, the belief that one can execute the actions a career requires; outcome expectations, beliefs about what those actions will produce; and goals, the intentions that convert belief into behavior. Distal inputs such as gender, ethnicity and family background matter mainly because they shape access to the learning experiences that feed these engines. A close cousin of self-efficacy is academic self-concept: a student’s accumulated judgment of how good they are at math or science, assembled from grades, peer comparisons and messages from teachers. The researchers reasoned that if SCCT is a genuinely general theory, it should hold not only at selective four-year universities, where most tests have been run, but across the institutional transitions that define community college students’ lives — high school to two-year college, and often onward to transfer.

To test that proposition, the team drew on the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, or HSLS:09, a nationally representative dataset run by the National Center for Education Statistics that tracked a cohort from its ninth-grade year in 2009 into the years following high school. The analytic sample consisted of students who began their postsecondary education at community colleges. The researchers used logistic regression, a statistical method that models the log-odds of a binary outcome as a weighted combination of predictors, where each coefficient captures how a one-unit change in a variable shifts the odds of the outcome while other variables are held constant. Two outcomes were modeled separately: whether a student aspired to a STEM career in ninth grade, and whether that student later reported occupational experiences aligned with the STEM career they had named years earlier. The predictor blocks included demographic characteristics, high school STEM course-taking behaviors, career exploration activities, math and science self-concepts, first-year STEM grade point averages in college, and students’ perceptions of gender discrimination in their STEM courses — a design that treats classroom climate as a measurable variable.

The gender result was the study’s clearest. Women were significantly less likely than men to express STEM career aspirations in ninth grade, and significantly less likely to report alignment between those earlier ambitions and their early occupational experiences. The finding lands in familiar territory: research has long shown that stereotypes about who belongs in science shape adolescents’ motivation, that classroom interaction patterns can chill women’s participation in college courses, and that these pressures compound at the intersection of gender and race. What gives the new result its edge is the longitudinal design: rather than a snapshot of who currently occupies STEM jobs, it shows gender differences emerging in the dreams of fourteen-year-olds and persisting through the transition into work and further study — among students, moreover, who all passed through the same institutional gateway. Building perceived gender discrimination in STEM courses into the models as a predictor reflects the authors’ framing: the pipeline is not merely a psychological funnel but a social one, and the social part is measurable.

Socioeconomic status followed a subtler script. Family background was associated with whether students aspired to STEM careers in the first place, echoing long-standing evidence that resources, parental education and school quality feed early career imagination. But once an aspiration existed, socioeconomic status did not predict whether it survived into aligned early occupational experiences — a sign that the decisive filtering runs through academic and psychological channels rather than through money alone. Race and ethnicity, meanwhile, were not statistically significant predictors of either outcome once academic performance and self-concept variables entered the models. The authors interpret this as evidence that measurable academic and cognitive factors carry much of the apparent demographic association. That interpretation demands care: structural forces such as segregated schooling, unequal course access and hostile departmental climates can operate precisely through those academic and self-concept channels, so a null coefficient for race in a statistical model is not a certificate that structural barriers are absent — a caution long emphasized in scholarship on structural racism in STEM higher education.

The study’s most practically striking finding concerns what actually builds ninth-grade STEM aspirations. The standout was intentional science course-taking: enrolling in science classes expressly because a student believed they were needed for a career goal. Students who took science courses for career purposes were markedly more likely to name a STEM occupation as ninth graders. General career exploration activities, by contrast — the fairs, counseling sessions and informational encounters that schools routinely deploy — were not significant predictors at all. The implication borders on the contrarian: exposure does not create ambition; purposeful action does. Choosing a science course because it leads somewhere is, in the language of the theory, goal-directed behavior that both requires and reinforces the belief that a science career is attainable. It fits older evidence that educational experiences, not single moments of inspiration, accompany eventual STEM degree attainment, and work showing that high school course-taking ripples forward into the choice of science and mathematics majors.

Once students reached community college, a different set of forces took over. First-year STEM course GPA was positively associated with aspiration–career alignment: students who performed well in their initial college STEM coursework were more likely to report, three years after high school, that their occupational lives matched their ninth-grade ambitions. College math self-concept — the sense of being mathematically capable that students carry through their first year — showed the same positive association. Early grades act as high-salience feedback signals that either confirm or contradict the academic identity a student has been building since childhood; a strong first semester tells an aspiring technician or engineer that the identity still fits, while early failure invites revision of the story. Prior research has shown that first-year grades predict who pursues STEM majors, including among first-generation students, and that community college course-taking patterns shape viable STEM transfer pathways. The new study extends that logic from persistence to something subtler: the felt continuity between a teenage ambition and an adult reality.

In an exploratory appendix, the researchers examined a subsample of 140 students who transferred from community colleges to four-year institutions, asking what predicted declaring a STEM major after transfer. The estimates come with an explicit warning about statistical power, but their pattern is revealing. Taking mathematics courses in high school for career purposes multiplied the odds of later declaring a STEM major by about 8.5 — an odds ratio of 8.542, meaning that, all else equal, these students were more than eight times as likely to commit to a STEM field after transferring. Higher math self-concept in high school roughly doubled the odds, at 2.800, while science self-concept measured three years after high school was the strongest psychological variable, multiplying the odds by 7.827. Strikingly, talking about careers in high school was negatively associated with declaring a STEM major after transfer — an inverse relationship consistent with the study’s larger theme: career talk detached from coursework that builds competence and confidence may accompany deep uncertainty about the future rather than resolve it.

The authors frame their contribution as an extension of Social Cognitive Career Theory across institutional transitions — a demonstration that the theory’s machinery, usually tested on a single campus, also explains how early aspirations survive or dissolve as students move from high school into community college and early occupational life. On that reading, the sustainability of a ninth-grade dream is not a private matter of grit but an institutional outcome, jointly produced by high schools that either connect course selection to career purpose or do not, and by colleges whose gateway STEM courses either confirm a student’s mathematical self-belief or erode it. Advising that steers ninth graders into science courses tied to concrete career goals may accomplish more than another round of career awareness campaigns, and gateway STEM courses — where so many community college students meet their first college-level test of a scientific or engineering identity — deserve to be treated as identity-shaping events rather than sorting mechanisms. Aspirations, the study suggests, are not made or broken in a single moment; they are built or dismantled across a decade of choices, grades and quiet self-judgments — and the institutions a student passes through hold many of the levers.