Suchergebnisse

Using eighteen years of data from more than 1,300 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, we investigate the extent to which institutional characteristics and contextual factors influence the propensity of colleges to indicate that they consider race/ethnicity in their admissions decisions. Consideration of race/ethnicity in admissions declined sharply after the mid-1990s, especially at public institutions. Rather than being shaped by specific historical and political contexts, consideration of race/ethnicity in admissions appears to be a widely institutionalized practice in higher education that has been tempered by changes in the policy environment over time.

Graduate and professional education play an increasingly important role in economic inequality and elite formation in the United States, but sociologists have not subjected stratification in and through graduate education to the same level of scrutiny recently applied to undergraduate and subbaccalaureate education. In this review, we discuss how prominent stratification theories might be extended to studies of the role of graduate and professional education, and we review research about stratification at junctures along student pathways into and through postbaccalaureate education to the labor market. Especially in doctoral and professional education, we find persistent stratification, including pronounced educational inheritance and disparities in participation and degree attainment by race/ethnicity and gender. We propose future directions for inquiry, highlighting unanswered questions and conceptual issues concerning how the field of and pathways through postbaccalaureate education contribute to social stratification.

Empirical research on the decision to attend college is predicated largely on the assumption that students make conscious, utility-maximizing decisions about their educational careers. For many students this may not be the case; in fact, the authors find that a large share of students assume from a young age that they will attend college, exhibiting what might be called a college-going habitus. Consistent with critical arguments about how social class is reproduced, the authors find that white, native-born children of college-educated parents are more likely to take college for granted than their less advantaged peers. Students with a college-going habitus are more likely than others to apply to a four-year college by spring of their senior year in high school. Although social origin accounts for some of the association between habitus and college application, both advantaged and disadvantaged students appear to benefit from a college-going habitus.

In this paper, the authors investigate how participation in the Early Assessment Program (EAP), which provides California high school juniors with information about their academic readiness for college-level work at California State University campuses, affects their college-going behavior and need for remediation in college. Using administrative records from California State University-Sacramento and the California Department of Education, the authors find that participation in the Early Assessment Program reduces the average student's probability of needing remediation at California State University by 6.1 percentage points in English and 4.1 percentage points in mathematics. Rather than discouraging poorly prepared students from applying to Sacramento State, EAP appears to lead students to increase their academic preparation while still in high school. [Copyright John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.]

We focus on how standardized testing in American education has reflected, reproduced, and transformed social inequalities. We begin by describing inequalities in test score distributions by race/ethnicity, social origins, and gender over time. We then define learning, cognitive ability, and opportunity to learn, each of which influences the results of standardized tests. Next, we offer a brief history of standardized testing's role in American education. We then discuss the relationship between social stratification and measurement issues that arise in the context of standardized testing and the contemporary uses and misuses of standardized testing for diagnostic purposes, accountability, and gatekeeping. We conclude by reflecting on the past, present, and future role of testing in social stratification.

AbstractResearch on adolescent responsibilities outside of school rarely considers how schools and teachers mitigate the adverse consequences of those responsibilities on academic outcomes. We seek to understand when, and for whom, teachers and administrators accommodate students' out‐of‐school commitments. Analysing 61 interviews with teachers and staff at five high schools that serve predominantly low‐income students and survey responses from teachers across Wisconsin (N = 601), we find that staff identify responsibilities as connected to students' social class. Teacher responses to student responsibilities are largely individual and ad hoc, whilst administrators report accommodating students' paid work through structural changes.