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While considerable media attention has been paid to the student debt crisis in the United States, few stories have detailed how this burden falls disproportionately on Black borrowers. Recently, CNBC interviewed Jason Houle about how student loans contribute to the racial wealth gap.

In their research, Houle and his co-author found that Black Americans accumulate nearly twice as much debt as their white counterparts by graduation. This disparity grows through adulthood as Black borrowers pay their loans at a slower rate than whites (4% per year vs. 10% per year). Fifteen years after college, Black borrowers hold 185% more student debt than whites. Houle contends that “the racial wealth gap is both the biggest and has grown the fastest among those with a college education,” and that student loans are a primary reason for this trend. In fact, student loans explain roughly 25% of the total racial wealth gap by age 30.

Houle offers several explanations for this gap. Black students on average have less financial capacity to pay for college than whites, causing them to pursue more loans. Additionally, Black students are more likely to attend expensive for-profit colleges and use private loans, both of which offer fewer protections to consumers. Houle uses the phrase “predatory inclusion” to describe this phenomenon, remarking that expanded access to higher education for Black Americans has also expanded opportunities for financial institutions to exploit them. These findings have made Houle rethink the metaphor of higher education as an engine of upward mobility: 

“In a world where we have rising college costs and rising student debt, it raises questions about whether or not that engine may be sputtering out.”

The procedure for the Marshmallow Test is simple: give a child one marshmallow, and promise them one more if they can resist the first. This test, originally conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel, is intended to measure self-discipline and future success, and is arguably one of the most well-known studies in social science research. But in a recent article in The Atlantic, sociologist Jessica Calarco argues that success never stemmed from the ability to “delay gratification” — in this case, by not eating the marshmallow — but from one’s social and economic background.

A new study replicating the marshmallow test, which also accounts for mother’s education level and household income, finds a child’s capacity for self control does not influence their achievement later on. What does matter is socioeconomic standing and the opportunities that come with it. Children of lower socioeconomic standings have fewer opportunities for success and are less motivated to wait due to the conditions of their daily lives. Calarco explains,      

“For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.”

Amidst today’s “replication crisis,” the Marshmallow Test is just one of many classic social science studies to falter. In this case, social environment proves to reveal much more about a person and their future than impulsivity. Calarco concludes,

“The failure to confirm old assumptions pointed to an important truth: that circumstances matter more in shaping children’s lives than Mischel and his colleagues seemed to appreciate.”

Parenting is hard, whether you’re an academic or not. But when you’re a professor, there is one surefire way to help stay in the field, get tenure, and even score a pay bump. Be a man.

The message is clear: women with children in academia are at a disadvantage compared to both men with children and women without them. A recent article in Jezebel compiled findings from several studies to demonstrate this. According to sociologist Michelle Budig, high-income men get the biggest pay bump from having children in any job category, and low-income women lose the most.

A US News article, likewise reports that male professors with young children are more than three times as likely as women with young children to get tenure-track positions. Notably, women without children come in a close second: they are just under three times as likely as women with children to get tenure.

Along the same lines, women who have a baby as a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow are more than twice as likely as men who have children during this time to leave academic research. When it comes to having children in academia, women pay a harsh “baby penalty.”

Differences in education level lead to dramatically different views on when to become a parent, according to new research. John Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin shows that millennial women with college educations are more likely to wait until they are married before they have children than women without a college degree. In an interview with Sarah Kliff of Vox, Cherlin explains:

“We’re seeing the emergence two very different paths to adulthood. Among young adults without college educations, most of their childbearing is in their twenties and the majority of it is outside of marriage. That includes people who have gotten a two-year associate’s degree. The dividing line is the four-year degree. The vast majority of people with that college degree are having children in marriage. We didn’t see this 20 or 30 years ago. We didn’t see these sharp differences between the college graduates and non-graduates.”

This trend concerns Cherlin, as it could lead to a more unstable family life for the children of unmarried parents with a high school education. He sees a lack of middle-skill jobs as the cause of their financial instability. This leads to their higher rate of breaking up and ultimately reinforces economic inequalities between education groups. Parents who have a college education are less likely to get divorced, since they are the couples who are more likely to have two steady incomes.

When asked if we could turn this worrisome trend around, Cherlin posits:

“It depends on if you think we can turn the middle of the job market around, and if we can find productive employment for high school graduates. If that happens, then I think we have a chance of reversing the instability we’re seeing in family lives. I also think that it might be a good idea to promote a message that one should wait to have children until one is in a stable marriage.”

That said, providing an alternative vision of a future where the high-school and college-educated alike can navigate the new economy could lead to greater family stability for their kids.

Find out how your income ranks in different parts of the U.S. with this interactive graphic from the New York Times. Needless to say, what earns 1% status in New York is not the same as in Flint, Mich. Data comes from demographic researchers at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.

A breakdown of the jobs of the 1%, featured over on Sociological Images, is part of the same Times package.

Since the 1960s, sociologists have shied away from explaining the persistence of poverty in terms of cultural factors, instead emphasizing the social structures that create and perpetuate poverty. Now, the New York Times reports, there seems to be a resurgence of analysis linking culture and persistent poverty.

The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

This, however, is not a reproduction of ‘culture of poverty’ scholarship; current work is significantly different:

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.

Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson says that how people collectively view their community matters.

The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.

Sociologists try to unpack what this means:

Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.

In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.

The article speculates about several reasons why a cultural approach to studying poverty is reemerging, including a new generation of scholars, advancements in data collection and analysis, and shifts in broader discourse and attitudes outside the university, as well.

Take a look at the full article.

Census data are revealing growing income levels and declining rates of marriage  in the black middle class, according to the Washington Post. One sociologist reflects on her own experience with these trends:

Kris Marsh’s household doesn’t have two incomes. But in Prince George’s County, she is increasingly becoming the face of the black middle class.

Marsh, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, moved to Bowie last year from Los Angeles, determined to live in a place she had always heard was the promised land for educated, successful African Americans. She bought a large, single-family house in a development where many of her neighbors are also single women.

“I found a community I’m in love with,” said Marsh, who has done research on the role that single women are playing in fueling the expansion of the black middle class. “Just because I didn’t have a partner or a husband, it wasn’t going to prevent me from living in the area.”

Marsh’s experience in Maryland typifies broader national trends:

New census statistics from data collected in 2007 and 2008 show that an increasing number of African Americans across the country are becoming more like those in Prince George’s, as well as closer to the national demographic norm. Many blacks made strides during the past decade, with education levels and incomes rising faster than those of the U.S. population as a whole.

In 2008, 20 percent of African Americans had a bachelor’s or advanced degree, a 19 percent jump from 2000. The percentage of black households making more than $75,000 has gone up 42 percent since 1999, from about 13 percent to 18 percent.

But what of the Great Recession? Demographers weigh in:

The statistics do not reflect the effects of the recession, which has caused high unemployment among black men in particular, but demographers say it is unlikely to alter the long-term trend.

A political scientist, along with Marsh, offer some possible explanations for these changes:

Michael Dawson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, said black women are more likely to be single because of the high number of jailed African American men and because black women tend to obtain higher levels of education than black men, narrowing their options for a mate who is available and similarly educated.

Marsh said her research has shown that African American women are marrying later in life, if at all, and postponing having children.

Of course, disparities still exist between whites and blacks in the United States:

Despite the significant gains made by African Americans, there are still large and persistent disparities between blacks and whites in income, education and poverty rates, the national census numbers show. Whites are twice as likely as blacks to be in the upper-income brackets, and African Americans are three times more likely to be living in poverty.

Women who have kids tend to earn less than women who don’t, a phenomenon known as the “motherhood penalty.” But USA Today reports that  that when a woman has children makes a difference.

Researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park and the University of California at Los Angeles reviewed 35 years of data from some 2,200 women born between 1944 and 1954, and found that women who had kids in the early- to mid-20s or even younger didn’t fare as well economically as those who delayed.

Sociologist Joan Kahn, one of the study’s authors, comments:

“Women who delay childbearing end up as successful economically as women who didn’t have children, and we look at it basically throughout their adult years — well into their 50s,” she says.

The point, she says, is that women who are younger when they have kids and attempt to get back into the workforce later may not have that up-front investment in education and training, which those who have kids later benefit from. They earned equivalent wages and had higher status occupations just like women who were childless.

This week, the New York Times explores the increasing number of 20- and 30-somethings living with their parents:

In 1980, 11 percent of 25-to-34-year-olds were living in multi-generational households. By 2008, 20 percent were.These sons and daughters of baby boomers living with their parents again have been labeled boomerangers.

The biggest increases were registered in these categories: nonwhite, foreign-born young men who had never been married, and college graduates. …

Last year, 37 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds were unemployed or no longer looking for work. Ten percent of young adults, ages 18 to 34, said in the Pew survey they had moved back with their parents because of the recession. Two in 10 are full-time students, a quarter are unemployed, and about a third said they had lived on their own before returning home.

Commentary from CUNY sociologist:

“As the great recession has deepened and the job market has become tighter and tighter for young people, most especially those from minority backgrounds, more and more return or never leave the parental nest,” said Prof. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “If such a trend continues or deepens, the economic crisis may be creating a true ‘Failure to Launch’ generation.”

Read more.

More stay-at-home moms in the U.S. are going into business for themselves, Reuters reports:

The Small Business Administration says the number of self-employed women around the country jumped by 10 percent from 2000 to 2006, to 5.3 million.

For Lewis, an online marketplace called Etsy provided a place to sell her estate-style and faux vintage pieces. The website, www.etsy.com, lets craft makers set up their own virtual shops. It currently has more than 4.2 million users.

“It’s wonderful to be able to call my own shots,” Lewis said. “I can work at night, so if I want to do something with my family, I can.”

Launched in 2005, the Brooklyn, New York-based Etsy now has more than 400,000 sellers, most of whom are women, and posted more than $180 million in sales last year. Nearly 70 percent of sellers are college-educated.

Moms cite balance and flexibility as reasons to start their own online craft shops. A sociologist comments on the trend:

“Women are looking to both work and take care of families, but the traditional workplace doesn’t provide that opportunity, so they are looking for their own ingenious ways (to do that),” said Pamela Stone, a sociology professor at New York City’s Hunter College.

“What women are seeking is flexibility and these companies are providing them with this option,” said Stone, who wrote “Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.”