ABSTRACT
For modeling educational attainment, there are three types of commitment toward alternative futures: purposive, normative, and imitative. To construct the stochastic decision tree model of commitment, the author have borrowed and extended the strongest pieces of both status socialization and rational choice models of educational attainment. The stochastic decision tree model of commitment that he develop is designed to enable the explicit modeling of questions such as these, based on a belief formation framework that gives separable influence to the accuracy and amount of information available to students. For the stochastic decision tree model of commitment, students recognize that the decision tree they are consulting is simply a rough approximation to the complex set of real-life lotteries to which they are ultimately subjected. Everyday commitment to preparation for college instruction varies across high school students, affecting resulting enrollment decisions and the potential gains from college instruction.
