Josipa Roksa

Parenting and Academic Achievement: Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Advantage

A growing body of research has examined how cultural capital, recently broadened to include not only high-status cultural activities but also a range of different parenting practices, influences children’s educational success. Most of this research assumes that parents’ current class location is the starting point of class transmission. However, does the ability of parents to pass advantages to their children, particularly through specific cultural practices, depend solely on their current class location or also on their class of origin? The authors address this question by defining social background as a combination of parents’ current class location and their own family backgrounds. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement, the authors examine how different categories of social background are related to parenting practices and children’s academic achievement. The results offer novel insights into the transmission of class advantage across generations and inform debates about the complex processes of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility.

Double Disadvantage or Blessing in Disguise? Understanding the Relationship Between College Major and Employment Sector:

Although college graduates earn substantial labor market rewards, not all college degrees are rewarded equally. Graduates who majored in female-dominated fields earn substantially lower incomes than do graduates who majored in male-dominated fields. Income differentials that are associated with different types of college majors are extensively noted but poorly understood. This article advances the previous literature by examining how college major affects the labor market outcomes of college graduates through its relationship with employment sector. The results show that graduates of female-dominated fields are disproportionately employed in public and nonprofit organizations, which offer lower monetary rewards but facilitate access to professional and managerial positions. Notably, college major and employment sector interact in ways that reduce income penalties and enhance the occupational location of graduates of female-dominated fields who work in public and nonprofit settings. These findings highlight the importance of considering organizational context in the study of labor market outcomes, particularly when examining the gendered character of educational credentials and occupations.

Credits, Time, and Attainment: Articulation Policies and Success After Transfer:

While state legislatures are increasingly enacting articulation policies, research to date provides little evidence that these policies enhance students’ likelihood of transfer. Based on a careful historical review of state statutes, the authors propose that articulation policies do not improve transfer rates because that is not their intended purpose; the main goal of articulation policies is to prevent the loss of credits when students transfer within state higher education systems. Subsequently, the authors use the National Education Longitudinal Study to evaluate articulation policies based on an alternative set of outcomes: attainment of a bachelor’s degree, time to degree, and credits required to complete a bachelor’s degree. They discuss the limitations of existing data and propose that future studies be designed to specifically evaluate the transfer or loss of credits applicable toward general education requirements.

Accumulating advantages over time: Family experiences and social class inequality in academic achievement

Children from different family backgrounds enter schooling with different levels of academic skills, and those differences grow over time. What explains this growing inequality? While the social reproduction tradition has argued that family contexts are central to producing class gaps in academic achievement, recent quantitative studies have found that family experiences explain only a small portion of those inequalities. We propose that resolving this inconsistency requires developing a new measure of family experiences that captures the continuity of exposure over time and thus more closely reflects the logic of the social reproduction tradition. Results using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K) show that, consistent with previous quantitative research, time-specific measures of family experiences have little explanatory power. However, cumulative family experiences account for most of the growing inequality in academic achievement between children from different social class backgrounds over time. These findings support claims from the social reproduction tradition, and contribute more broadly to the understanding of how family experiences contribute to social inequality.

The State of Undergraduate Learning

35 H ow much are students learning in college? That question begs another one: What should students be learning in college? In Our Underachieving Colleges, former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, proposed a range of goals, from learning to communicate to developing character and learning to live in a diverse and global society. He also pointed out that while faculty rarely agree on the purposes of higher education and tend to shy away from discussions of values and morals, they overwhelmingly agree that their students should learn how to think critically. Indeed, a recent study by the Higher Education Research Institute noted that virtually all faculty report that developing students’ ability to think critically is a very important or essential goal of undergraduate education, as is promoting students’ ability to write effectively. But even if faculty concur that students should develop critical thinking and writing skills (among many others) during college, the question remains of how those skills should be assessed. In its critique of higher education, the Spellings’ Commission claimed, based on findings from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, that “the quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate and, in some cases, declining.” The Commission also highlighted some promising attempts to assess collegiate learning, including the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Since then, the CLA, along with the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP), has been adopted by the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) as a measure that institutions may use to report on the learning of their students in the VSA’s College Portrait. The CLA focuses on general skills such as critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communication. It consists of three components: a performance task and two analytical writing exercises (make an argument and break an argument). The performance task is the CLA’s most innovative component. Students have 90 minutes to respond to a writing prompt representing a “real-world” scenario, in which they are presented with a task or a dilemma and need to use a range of background documents (from memos and newspaper articles to reports, journal articles, and graphic representations) to solve it. The testing materials, including the background documents, are accessed through a computer. (Go to the CLA website at http:// www.collegiatelearningassessment.org for examples of representative performance tasks and scoring rubrics). By Josipa Roksa and RichaRd aRum

Making the Transition to Four-Year Institutions: Academic Preparation and Transfer

In this study, we examine the role of academic preparation in the transition from community colleges to four-year institutions. We address two specific questions: To what extent do academically unprepared students transfer to four-year institutions? And, can positive experiences in community colleges diminish the role of inadequate academic preparation? The results, which are based on analyses of Florida’s unit record data of first-time community college students, indicate that a substantial proportion of students who enter community colleges academically unprepared do indeed transfer to four-year institutions. Moreover, successful completion of intermediate outcomes — such as passing college-level math and writing courses, meeting specific credit thresholds, and earning an associate degree — enhances students’ probability of transfer. However, the ability of community colleges to mitigate the negative effects of inadequate academic preparation is limited: successful completion of even the most demanding intermediate outcomes does not alleviate the negative consequences of entering higher education unprepared. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Life after College: The Challenging Transitions of the "Academically Adrift" Cohort.

Change • July/August 2012 Josipa Roksa (jroksa@virginia.edu) is an associate professor of sociology and education at the University of Virginia and associate director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Richard Arum (richard.arum@nyu.edu) is a professor of sociology and education at New York University and director of the educational research program at the Social Science Research Council. They are co-authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011, University of Chicago Press).They have followed the cohort of students from Academically Adrift into life after college and are currently preparing a book manuscript exploring graduates’ transitions to adulthood. By Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum LIFE AFTER COLLEGE

Null effects of boot camps and short-format training for PhD students in life sciences

Significance To increase the effectiveness of graduate research training, many universities have introduced boot camps and bridge programs lasting several days to several weeks. National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health currently support such interventions with nearly

Providing a ''Leg Up'': Parental Involvement and Opportunity Hoarding in College.

28 million in active awards. Previous evidence for the efficacy of this format exists primarily in the form of anecdotes and end-of-course surveys. Here we show that participation in such short-format interventions is not associated with observable benefits related to skill development, scholarly productivity, or socialization into the academic community. Analyzing data from 294 PhD students in life sciences from 53 US institutions, we found no evidence of effectiveness across 115 variables. We conclude that boot camps and other short formats may not durably impact student outcomes. Many PhD programs incorporate boot camps and summer bridge programs to accelerate the development of doctoral students’ research skills and acculturation into their respective disciplines. These brief, high-intensity experiences span no more than several weeks and are typically designed to expose graduate students to data analysis techniques, to develop scientific writing skills, and to better embed incoming students into the scholarly community. However, there is no previous study that directly measures the outcomes of PhD students who participate in such programs and compares them to the outcomes of students who did not participate. Likewise, no previous study has used a longitudinal design to assess these outcomes over time. Here we show that participation in such programs is not associated with detectable benefits related to skill development, socialization into the academic community, or scholarly productivity for students in our sample. Analyzing data from 294 PhD students in the life sciences from 53 US institutions, we found no statistically significant differences in outcomes between participants and nonparticipants across 115 variables. These results stand in contrast to prior studies presenting boot camps as effective interventions based on participant satisfaction and perceived value. Many universities and government agencies (e.g., National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation) invest substantial resources in boot camp and summer bridge activities in the hopes of better supporting scientific workforce development. Our findings do not reveal any measurable benefits to students, indicating that an allocation of limited resources to alternative strategies with stronger empirical foundations warrants consideration.

Time-to-Credit Gender Inequities of First-Year PhD Students in the Biological Sciences

Although higher education scholars are increasingly exploring disparities within institutions, they have yet to examine how parental involvement contributes to social-class variation in students’ experiences. We ask, what role do parents play in producing divergent college experiences for students from different class backgrounds? Relying on interviews with 41 families, including mothers, fathers, and their daughters, we find that affluent parents serve as a ‘‘college concierge,’’ using class resources to provide youth with academic, social, and career support and access to exclusive university infrastructure. Less affluent parents, instead, describe themselves as ‘‘outsiders’’ who are unable to help their offspring and find the university unresponsive to their needs. Our findings suggest that affluent parents distinguish their children’s college experiences from those of peers, extending ‘‘effectively maintained inequality’’ beyond the K-12 education. Universities may be receptive of these efforts due to funding shifts that make recruiting affluent, out-of-state families desirable.