It is no surprise that children of well-off, well-educated parents graduate high school and college at higher rates than children of low-income, low-educated parents. In urban centers half or fewer of entering first graders graduates high school in 12 years, many who do are not college-ready. The questions for policy-makers are twofold: Do these children and their parents aspire to college; can small changes leverage these aspirations into better educational attainment? The good news: Most parents and children aspire to college and small changes in how children imagine their future have disproportionately large effects on whether these aspirations are translated into a reality of finishing high school prepared for the next steps of education.

However, aspiring to college is not enough. Many children with high aspirations do not take sufficient action to work toward their school goals. This paper uses identity-based motivation theory (Oyserman, 2007, 2009, 2013) to predict that school-focused aspirations predict action if at the moment of judgment, they are accessible (come to mind) and feel relevant. Relevance is operationalized in three ways: Feeling congruent with important social identities (e.g., race-ethnicity, social class), feeling connected with relevant behavioral strategies (studying, asking questions), and providing an interpretation of difficulties along the way as implying task importance, not impossibility.

Family assets and child savings are likely to influence each of these elements of identity relevance by influencing how close the future feels, how parents and children imagine their child’s future and how difficulty is interpreted. Low resources might imply that there won’t be money for college so that a college bound future self feels distant. If so, it may not come to mind or feel irrelevant to current parenting and childrearing choices for parents. For children strategies (e.g., studying, asking questions in class) that would come to mind if the ‘college-bound’ self were on one’s mind then don’t. If the ‘college-bound’ self feels distal or does not come to mind at all, parents and children might interpret difficulties along the way as meaning that succeeding in school is an impossible goal rather than an important one. To change this, an exciting possibility is to introduce child-focused savings accounts either at birth or linked to school entry. Saving even small sums might solidify the idea that the present is connected to the future so that what one does now matters for the future especially if saving is articulated as a future-focused activity and linked to other future-focused activities in school. Children from low-income families who have bank accounts and mentally account money as ‘for college’ are more likely to attend college.  Because prior evidence involves individual and family-level difference (the kind of low-income family that opens a children’s bank account, the kind of child who mentally accounts for the future) it cannot be assumed that opening bank accounts for all children will have the same effect without linking savings to activities that make the future feel connected to the present. This is testable and we articulate a plan to do so.