The high school period represents the time when young people shape their career aspirations, choosing from various educational or working pathways. This process involves the development of a cultural ability known as the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai, 2004), which indicates the ability to represent the future, navigate the dense combination of nodes and pathways, set goals and make plans to reach them. This concept has been widely applied in educational research to understand students’ aspirations, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Indeed, social and material resources significantly influence the development of career aspirations (Mazenod et al., 2019), underscoring the need to understand how poverty traps can manifest as constraints internal to individuals, such as impaired agency or lack of hope, leading to a compromised capacity to aspire. 

Although the role of the capacity to aspire has been recognized as pivotal in enabling aspirations (Bok, 2010), a clear and comprehensive operational definition of the concept, as well as its measurement, remains elusive in the existing literature. The present work aims to address this gap by proposing an operationalization of students’ capacity to aspire and identifying the proper dimensions and indicators to obtain an appropriate assessment. To ensure the rigor of the research, the study employs both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to explore and validate the underlying factorial structure. 

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides a theoretical definition of the capacity to aspire and delineates its hypothesized theoretical dimensions; Section 3 describes the data collection procedure and the adopted measures; Section 4 reports the main results obtained from statistical analysis; and Section 5 includes a discussion of the results and some conclusions.