Claudia Buchmann

The Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of Family Background and Academic Achievement

In a few short decades, the gender gap in college completion has reversed from favoring men to favoring women. This study, which is the first to assess broadly the causes of the growing female advantage in college completion, considers the impact of family resources as well as gender differences in academic performance and in the pathways to college completion on the rising gender gap. Analyses of General Social Survey data indicate that the female-favorable trend in college completion emerged unevenly by family status of origin to the disadvantage of sons in families with a low-educated or absent father. Additional analyses of National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS) data indicate that womens superior academic performance plays a large role in producing the gender gap in college completion, but that this effect remains latent until after the transition to college. For NELS cohorts, who were born in the mid-1970s, the female advantage in college completion remains largest in families with a low-educated or absent father, but currently extends to all family types. In conjunction with womens growing incentives to attain higher education, gender differences in resources related to family background and academic performance largely explain the growing female advantage in college completion.

Gender-specific trends in the value of education and the emerging gender gap in college completion.

Analysis of March Current Population Survey data from 1964 through 2002 shows that white women overtook white men in their rates of college completion and that this phenomenon occurred during a period in which women’s standard-of-living gains from college completion grew at a faster rate than those for men. We assess whether these trends are related to changes in the value of education for men and women in terms of earnings returns to higher education, the probability of getting and staying married, education-related differences in family standard of living, and insurance against living in poverty. Although returns to a college education in the form of earnings remained higher for women than for men over the entire period, trends in these returns do not provide a plausible explanation for gender-specific trends in college completion. But when broader measures of material well- being are taken into account, women’s returns to higher education appear to have risen faster than those of men.

GETTING AHEAD IN KENYA: SOCIAL CAPITAL, SHADOW EDUCATION, AND ACHIEVEMENT

This study of Kenya addresses two questions: Do social and cultural capital matter for school achievement, net of family background factors? If so, what aspects matter most? The paper examines shadow education, which consists of tutoring and exam preparation classes, as a form of cultural capital utilized by some families to advance childrens likelihood of educational success. With data for 506 households, it determines who is most likely to participate in shadow education and assesses the consequences of shadow education and other measures of family social and cultural capital for two educational outcomes: grade repetition and academic performance. Results indicate that boys and urban children are more likely to participate in shadow schooling which, in turn, is related to lower incidence of grade repetition and higher academic performance. Other measures of cultural capital, such as language spoken in the home and mothers reading habits, reduce the likelihood of grade repetition. Schooling and Social Capital in Diverse Cultures, Volume 13, pages 133-159. Copyright

The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons

It is often asserted that the gender gap in educational attainment is larger for blacks than whites, but historical trends comparing the black and white gender gap have received surprisingly little attention. Analysis of historical data from the U.S. census IPUMS samples shows that the gender gap in college completion has evolved differently for whites and blacks. Historically, the female advantage in educational attainment among blacks is linked to more favorable labor market opportunities and stronger incentives for employment for educated black women. Blacks, particularly black males, still lag far behind whites in their rates of college completion, but the striking educational gains of white women have caused the racial patterns of gender differences in college completion rates to grow more similar over time. While some have linked the disadvantaged position of black males to their high risk of incarceration, our estimates suggest that incarceration has a relatively small impact on the black gender gap and the racial gap in college completion rates for males in the United States.

Educational achievement of immigrant-origin and native students: A comparative analysis informed by institutional theory

With some important exceptions, immigrants tend to lag behind native students in terms of educational attainment and academic achievement. Prior research has focused on two individual-level explanations for the educationally disadvantaged position of immigrant students.

THE BLACK-WHITE ACHIEVEMENT GAP IN THE FIRST COLLEGE YEAR: EVIDENCE FROM A NEW LONGITUDINAL CASE STUDY

ABSTRACT In the United States, an achievement gap between whites and blacks persists at all levels of schooling from elementary school to higher education. Definitive reasons and remedies for minority underperformance remain unclear. This study examines how students acquire and utilize “collegiate capital” which, in turn, relates to their academic achievement in the first year of college. Results indicate that significant black-white differences in academic achievement emerge as early as the first semester of students’ first year in college. Controls for family background, parental involvement, prior ability, cultural capital acquired during the middle- and high-school years, and other factors produce a moderate reduction in the achievement gap, but over half of the gap remains unexplained. The study is part of a larger research project that involves a longitudinal study of two cohorts – the graduating classes of 2005 and 2006 – at a major private university. Through the assessment of pre-college differences and extensive data collected via student surveys and academic records during the college years, the goal of the larger project is to illuminate the factors underlying raced-based variations on a range of academic outcomes such as educational performance and attainment, but also several new measures of collegiate intellectual development such as students’ ecological integration, perceptions of other groups, and satisfaction with college.

The Debt Crisis, Structural Adjustment and Women's Education

The debt crisis and structural adjustment policies have created severe hardship in many countries and may be especially harmful for women. This paper discusses the possible deleterious effects of these macroeconomic conditions on womens quality of life in general and their status in terms of education, employment and health. Then it provides a quantitative cross-national analysis to assess the impact of the debt crisis and structural adjustment on womens status. It finds evidence that structural adjustment policies have a negative effect on female educational enrollments. Education is found to be an important determinant of womens economic activity and health status. Based on these findings, the article maintains that the macroeconomic crisis does not augur well for continued social development and the improved status of women in indebted countries.

Poverty and educational inequality in sub-Saharan Africa

ConclusionIn the last two decades of the twentieth century, many Africans have experienced decline or stagnation in the quality of their lives. The continued high rates of poverty and declining educational enrolments in the region are outcomes of multiple factors, including escalating debt and declining development assistance on the global level and fiscal mismanagement, weak governance and continued population growth within African countries. One realization that has come from the experiences of recent decades is that poverty is both a cause and an outcome of low educational enrolments. Breaking the cycle requires great effort on two fronts simultaneously: (a) a targeted attack on poverty through policies that promote sustainable and equitable development; and (b) an unwavering long-term investment in basic education (Psacharopoulos, 1995). The question remains whether international organizations, African governments and local communities will heed the lessons learned from past missteps and apply them to future educational initiatives. Both the international communitys renewed awareness of the importance of basic education and the recent educational efforts of African-based NGOs suggest that the answer to this question is a tentative ‘yes’. Perhaps the first decade of the new millennium will bring a more definitive answer.

Frontiers in Comparative and International Sociology of Education: American Distinctiveness and Global Diversity

This chapter assesses the degree to which the American sociology of education is comparative and international in scope and briefly considers why the attention devoted to comparative and international research has remained relatively stable over time. It then describes the broad intellectual returns that a more comparative and international lens could bring to the field generally. Comparative and international research can determine the degree to which propositions formulated in the USA can apply to other contexts. Such research can generate important questions for further research that would not be considered if only a US-centric lens were used. A comparative lens can also serve to caution scholars against the tendency to generalize knowledge from the often atypical case of the American educational system. This chapter explains the distinctive role of comparative and international research for advancing new insights on longstanding substantive questions and provides examples of past research that has done so. It then discusses some pressing questions rarely considered by US-based research that constitute frontiers for a more globally oriented and theoretically expansive sociology of education.

Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half.By James Rosenbaum. Russell Sage Foundation, 2001. 323 pp. Cloth

over the form and nature of corporate governance. There have been lulls in this turbulence since, but many matters remain unsettled and contested. Fligstein, by contrast, sees “conceptions of control,” intracorporate and crosscorporate social structures, “controlling competition.” This is hardly an approach to corporate governance that will dazzle economists or legal scholars. Or, alternatively, Fligstein makes much of the truism that the governance and behavior of business enterprises in any society generally reflect the larger institutional design of that society, rather than blatantly challenging it. The problem with this truism is that economics has distinguished itself, and prospered as a policy science, by distinguishing its domain of study analytically. And all such analytical efforts are, by definition, artificial, neglecting of larger contexts. For sociologists to call for economists to reverse course, to approach their domain less analytically, is a nonstarter. Rather, what can win converts to a sociological approach to the economy is to demonstrate unambiguously that this approach can better address and resolve some major issue currently at the center of economic (and legal) debate. One such issue is why the corporate judiciary continues to impose fiduciary duties on corporate managers and shareholder majorities despite contractarians’ compelling arguments that this is anachronistic. This judicial behavior is an empirical fact in the world, and economists and legal scholars continue to have great difficulty accounting for it with their own conceptual frameworks. Fligstein’s repeated references to “conceptions of control” cannot be worked into a credible account either, and yet this judicial behavior is more sociological than narrowly economic or legal. If social theories cannot help economists and legal scholars here, then sociologists cannot hope to influence them more generally.