Desirable Ideal or Achievable Reality: Gender Gap in Parental Overoptimistic Apirations

Do parents hold misbeliefs about their children’s future college eligibility? Are these misbeliefs gendered? Do they affect present track choice. We survey approximately 4,000 parents of ninth-graders in Albania and benchmark their future beliefs against administrative records of 9,370 students from an earlier cohort. Parents systematically overestimate their children’s college-eligibility chances — and do so substantially more for sons than for daughters, especially when they aspire for STEM careers. This gap is not explained by son favoritism, nor by ignorance of current academic performance. The primary mechanism is a failure to incorporate a known reality into belief formation: parents know girls do better, but fail to translate this into realistic forecasts. While misbeliefs are positively associated with actual track enrollment, the association is negligible in magnitude because track choice is mainly driven by actual performance.