Suchergebnisse

In an era of rising college costs and stagnant grant-based student aid, many young adults rely on their parents' resources and student loans to pay for their postsecondary education. In this study I ask how parents' income and education are linked to young adults' student loan debt. I develop and test two perspectives regarding the functional form of the association between parents' income, parents' education, and student loan debt. I have four key findings. First, the relationship between parents' income and student loan debt is nonlinear, such that young adults from middle-income families have a higher risk for debt than do those from low- and high-income families. Second, young adults from college-educated and high-income families are relatively protected from debt. Third, the association between parents' socioeconomic status (SES) and debt is modified by postsecondary institutional characteristics and is strongest at private and high-cost institutions. Finally, the effect of parents' SES on debt varies across the debt distribution. Parents' SES is strongly predictive of entry into debt, but there are few differences conditional on going into debt. This suggests that socioeconomic disparities in debt are primarily driven by the probability of going into debt rather than differences among debtors. However, compared to their more advantaged counterparts, young adults from low-SES backgrounds have a higher risk of accruing debt burdens that exceed the national average.

A nascent literature recognizes that student loan debt is racialized and disproportionately affects youth of color, especially black youth. In this study, the authors expand on this research and ask whether black-white disparities in student debt persist, decline, or increase across the early adult life course, examine possible mechanisms for changes in racial disparities in student debt across early adulthood, and ask whether racial disparities in student debt contribute to black-white wealth inequality among a recent cohort of college-going young adults. The authors address these questions using nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, multilevel growth curve models, and linear decomposition methods. There are three findings. First, black-white disparities in debt increase across the early adult life course, and previous research underestimated racial disparities in debt. Second, growth in this racial disparity is partially explained by differences in the social background, postsecondary experiences, and disparities in attained social and economic status of black and white young adults. As a result, the authors find that, compositionally, racial inequalities in student debt account for a substantial minority of the black-white wealth gap in early adulthood and that this contribution increases across the early adult life course. The authors conclude that debt trajectories are more informative than point-in-time estimates and that student debt may be a new mechanism of wealth inequality that creates fragility in the next generation of the black middle class.

Contact with the American criminal justice system is associated with socioeconomic disadvantage and financial insecurity, but little research has explored the link between criminal justice contact and indebtedness. In this study, we ask whether contact in young adulthood is associated with access to credit and unsecured debt burdens. We also focus on state-level policies that operate alongside official punishments and restrict citizenship and societal participation among the justice-involved (termed hidden sentences), and ask whether such policies moderate the association between criminal justice contact and indebtedness. We find that criminal justice contact, especially incarceration, is associated with reduced access to unsecured credit and greater absolute and relative debt burdens. These associations are strongest for individuals residing in states with more onerous hidden sentence regimes. We argue that indebtedness is a key socioeconomic consequence of criminal justice contact and that hidden sentences may exacerbate these consequences.

Borrowing from federal government loan programs to finance college is now commonplace for American undergraduates. Half of all college students had such loans in 2011-12. The typical senior has accumulated about $20,000 in debt and total college loan indebtedness had grown to more than $1 trillion by 2011-12. Repayments for more than one in ten loans are currently at least ninety days overdue, and the delinquency rate has doubled over the last decade. With lower incomes and less wealth overall, black families have a greater need to borrow to send their sons and daughters to college and black students are twice as likely as whites to have student debt. This report points out some recommendations for reforms to the Higher Education Act. ; Scholars Strategy Network

U.S. suicide rates vary across the states and are higher in the American West than in other regions. Reasons for these patterns have eluded social scientists. This research note examines whether residential stability and population density as ecological contexts for social integration help explain the patterns. Reflecting Durkheimian reasoning, results suggest that residential stability helps explain both the high Western suicide rate and state suicide rates more generally. Final remarks address the theoretical and empirical implications of the findings.

Background Longevity in the United States ranks below most other Western nations despite spending more on healthcare per capita than any other country. Across the world, mortality has been declining, but in the USA the trend toward improvement has stalled in some middle-aged demographic groups. Cross-national studies suggest that social welfare is positively associated with longevity. The United States has less government sponsored welfare, education and healthcare than almost all other Western nations, but the level of this social welfare commitment varies across the states. In this study we examined the association of state tax burden and state government expenditures with subsequent middle-aged mortality. Methods The primary exposure was state tax burden in 2005, defined as proportion of all state income paid to the state. We also examined the impact of state expenditures per capita in 2005 for education, healthcare, welfare, police and highways. The dependent variable was mortality during the subsequent 10 years. Death counts and population sizes by sex, age group and race strata for 2006–2015 were abstracted from CDC WONDER. Binomial logistic regression was employed based on the number of deaths and underlying population within each county-sex-age-race bin. Results State tax burden in 2005 varied from 5.8% to 12.2%. An increase of 1.0 percentage point in state tax burden was associated with a 5.8% (SE = 0.1%) reduction in mortality adjusted for sex, age and race, but was associated with a 1.1% (SE = 0.1%) reduction when further adjusting for state income and education levels. Controlling for sex, age and race each type of state expenditures was associated with decreases in middle aged mortality, notably K-12 education (reduction of 4.7%, SE = 0.1%, per 10% expenditure increase) except healthcare but all types were associated with mortality decreases further controlling for state income and education. Conclusion The residents of states with higher state taxation and higher expenditures per capita have lower middle aged mortality rates.

Objective. Adolescent weight and depressive symptoms are serious population health concerns in their own right and as they relate to each other. This study asks whether relationships between weight and depressive symptoms vary by sex and race/ethnicity because both shape experiences of weight and psychological distress.Methods. Results are based on multivariate analyses of National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data.Results. There are no associations between adolescent girls' weight and depressive symptoms, but these associations vary considerably among boys. Underweight is associated with depressive symptoms among all boys and subpopulations of white and Hispanic boys. Among Hispanic boys, those who are overweight (vs. normal weight) have a lower probability of reporting depressive symptoms. Finally, among normal weight boys, Hispanics and blacks are more likely to report depressive symptoms than whites.Conclusions. Findings are a reminder that understanding population health issues sometimes requires a focus on subpopulations, not simply the population as a whole.

AbstractObjectivesWhile home foreclosures are often thought of as a household-level event, the consequences may be far-reaching, and spill over to the broader community. Older adults, in particular, could be affected by the spiral of community changes that result from foreclosures, but we know very little about how the foreclosure crisis is related to older adult health, in particular cognition.MethodThis article uses growth curve models and data from the Health and Retirement Study matched to Census and county-level foreclosure data to examine whether community foreclosures are related to older adults' cognitive health and the mechanisms responsible.ResultsWe find that higher rates of county-level foreclosures are associated with a faster decline in individual cognition at older ages. Although we examined an extensive number of individual and community mechanisms, including individual housing wealth and depressive symptoms, community structural factors, social factors, and perceptions of physical disorder and cohesion, none of the mechanisms examined here explained this relationship.DiscussionThis study shows that the adverse consequences of home foreclosures spill over to the local community, with implications for the cognitive health of older adults.