education

Earlier this week Inside Higher Education ran a fascinating story on the impact of parents on low-income high school students’ chances of enrolling in college.

The story begins…

Many studies have found that low-income high school students and those whose parents are not well educated are less likely to enroll in college. And disproportionate numbers of black and Latino youth fall into this group.

One solution to this problem is to increase the availability of aid — as the Obama administration and Congress appear to agree with their plans to increase the maximum Pell Grant significantly. But research presented [in San Francisco] Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association suggested that without shifting the attitudes of parents of low-income students — well before it’s time to enroll for college — any increases may not have the full impact desired.

New work presented by University of Washington sociologist Deborah M. Warnock, entitled  “Inequalities at the Outset,” uses ” a combination of federal and state databases in which parents are interviewed about college for their eighth graders.” According to Inside Higher Ed, Warnock “finds negative attitudes that not only are likely to discourage these youth from enrolling, but that suggest widespread ignorance of the present availability of aid — even before any Pell Grant growth — for those below the poverty line. And she found that low-income white parents may be particularly unaware of aid.”

Additional findings:

• Hispanic and Asian parents of eighth graders are less likely than white parents to think about how to finance a higher education, and black parents are more likely than white parents to think about paying for college.
• Parents with low incomes and less education are less likely than others to have thought about how to pay for college.
• While a majority of parents of all demographic groups who are below poverty level report that they believe they have “no way” of getting funds for college for their children, white parents in poverty are more likely to have this feeling than are minority parents.
• Among middle and upper income families, across the board, only a minority feel there is “no way” to pay for colleges. In this economic group, whites are less likely than minority parents to feel that way.

Read more.

This past weekend the Boston Globe ran a story about Obama’s new commitment to strengthening community colleges across the United States and drew upon expert commentary from Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The story:

FOR DECADES, American presidents lauded the working stiffs and immigrants who fill our community colleges, but then stiffed them during budget time. That ended this week when President Obama made one of his most welcome proposals of his first year, a $12 billion, 10-year plan to boost community colleges.

Obama called this a “historic step,’’ the biggest recognition of the importance of community colleges since the GI Bill and President Truman’s efforts that doubled the number of community colleges and increased their enrollment by seven times.

The sociologist’s reaction:

An interesting New York Times article published earlier this week highlighted a segment of the American workforce that is booming despite the persisting recession.

The Times reports:

The unemployment rate has risen precipitously to 9.4 percent, the highest level in nearly 30 years, and most of the jobs that do come open are quickly filled from the legions of seekers. But unnoticed in the government’s standard employment data, employers are begging for qualified applicants for certain occupations, even in hard times. Most of the jobs involve skills that take years to attain.

Welder is one, employers report. Critical care nurse is another. Electrical lineman is yet another, particularly those skilled in stringing high-voltage wires across the landscape. Special education teachers are in demand. So are geotechnical engineers, trained in geology as well as engineering, a combination sought for oil field work. Respiratory therapists, who help the ill breathe, are not easily found, at least not by the Permanente Medical Group, which employs more than 30,000 health professionals. And with infrastructure spending now on the rise, civil engineers are in demand to supervise the work.

The Times calls upon sociologist Richard Sennett to elaborate on this emerging trend…

For these hard-to-fill jobs, there seems to be a common denominator. Employers are looking for people who have acquired an exacting skill, first through education — often just high school vocational training — and then by honing it on the job. That trajectory, requiring years, is no longer so easy in America, said Richard Sennett, a New York University sociologist.

The pressure to earn a bachelor’s degree draws young people away from occupational training, particularly occupations that do not require college, Mr. Sennett said, and he cited two other factors. Outsourcing interrupts employment before a skill is fully developed, and layoffs undermine dedication to a single occupation. “People are told they can’t get back to work unless they retrain for a new skill,” he said.

Read more.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story today about the proposed elimination of the rural and community sociology program at Washington State University.

The justification for the cuts are as follows:

As colleges and universities struggle through the nation’s economic downturn, most are trying to preserve both academic programs and tenured faculty jobs. When it comes to saving money, universities are laying off staff members, freezing future faculty hiring, imposing furloughs, and trimming operating expenses. Some are merging academic departments, but few are eliminating them outright.

Besides theater and dance, Washington State also wants to get rid of the German major and the department of community and rural sociology. It figures the cuts will save $3.6-million over the next two years. In documents justifying the cuts, officials said professors in theater have too little time for research and that those in community and rural sociology bring in little money for research. Rural sociology has no undergraduate majors, and German awarded only four degrees in 2008. The theater program, administrators said, lacks “visibility and impact.”

But…

The university may have underestimated the outpouring of support for some of the programs it wants to scrap. Scholars have staged a national letter-writing campaign on behalf of the rural-sociology department, and in May students in theater and dance conducted a silent march across the campus to the president’s office.

The Chronicle featured commentary from some Washington State University sociologists:

Annabel R. Kirschner, a full professor in community and rural sociology, is just three years away from her planned retirement. Closing academic programs and laying off tenured faculty, she says, are dramatic steps for a university to take. “I’m concerned it will reflect on the prestige of the university for many years to come,” she says. Besides, Ms. Kirschner believes the action just wasn’t necessary. “If they had done a 10-percent cut across the board,” she says, “there wouldn’t be a need to terminate tenured faculty.” Mr. Bayly [the University Provost], however, says the university already tried that approach, making across-the-board reductions totaling between 2 percent and 5 percent in about 10 of the last 15 years. It wasn’t enough, he says.

José L. García-Pabón has taught in the community and rural sociology department at Washington State for only two years. His position is unique: He is the university’s first Latino community-development specialist. He works with Latino farmers on agriculture and health issues, and on literacy issues with the Latino population in general. Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the state. “If I’m gone,” he adds, “I don’t think anyone’s going to continue to do these kinds of things.”

Read more.

In reporting on President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court, the New York Times noted that “President Obama may have broken with history by nominating a Latina to the Supreme Court, but in another respect he followed the path of almost every president in modern times who has successfully placed a justice: he chose a nominee groomed in an Ivy League university.”

In a story titled, “An Ivy-Covered Path to the Supreme Court,” the Times reports:

If confirmed, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who attended Princeton University and Yale Law School, would sit alongside seven other Ivy League graduates on the court. Only Justice John Paul Stevens provides a measure of non-Ivy diversity, having graduated from the University of Chicago and the Northwestern University School of Law.

In the history of the court, half of the 110 justices were undergraduates, graduate students or law students in the Ivy League; since 1950, the percentage is 70. From the beginning of the 20th century, every president who has seated a justice has picked at least one Ivy graduate. Four of the six justices on President Obama’s short list studied at Ivy League institutions, either as undergraduates or law students.

Whatever a nominee’s origins might be, does attending the same institutions shape them and their views, even subtly? Critics suggest that elite universities shave off the differences in backgrounds and contribute to a kind of high-level groupthink.

A sociologist weighs in…

“There is both a funneling and homogenizing effect from these schools,” said G. William Domhoff, a professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of “Who Rules America?”

The effect, Professor Domhoff said, “plays out in terms of social networks, cultural/social capital, and a feeling of being part of the in-group.” It is one of subtle conditioning — what Sam Rayburn, the former House speaker, meant when he famously said, “If you want to get along, go along.”

Even those who might not agree with Professor Domhoff’s political critique would like to see more educational variety on the Supreme Court. Limiting the universe of nominees largely to Ivy League graduates “is not good for the court or the country,” said Linda L. Addison, the partner in charge of the New York office of Fulbright & Jaworski. “Educational diversity would strengthen the court, as have racial, ethnic, gender and religious diversity.”

And another…

A president who attended a top university might gravitate toward those with a similar education. Stanley Aronowitz, a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, said the selection of Judge Sotomayor by a president who graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law was an example of “people wanting to appoint themselves.”

Professor Aronowitz, who has written extensively on questions of power, higher education and class, jokingly said, “What I think he means by ‘diversity’ is Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia.”

Read more.

With the murder of a physician who was a regular target of anti-abortion activists this past Sunday, news outlets have returned to covering the schism in our country on the abortion issue, this time focusing on a new study linking the likelihood of having an abortion to religiosity.

MSNBC reports:

Unwed pregnant teens and 20-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to obtain abortions than their peers from public schools, according to research in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

“This research suggests that young, unmarried women are confronted with a number of social, financial and health-related factors that can make it difficult for them to act according to religious values when deciding whether to keep or abort a pregnancy,” said the study’s author, sociologist Amy Adamczyk of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

More from Adamczyk…

Adamczyk examined how personal religious involvement, schoolmate religious involvement and school type influenced the pregnancy decisions of a sample of 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women age 26 and younger from 125 different schools. The women ranged in age from 14 to 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Twenty-five percent of women in the sample reported having an abortion, a likely underestimate, Adamczyk said.

Results revealed no significant link between a young woman’s reported decision to have an abortion and her personal religiosity, as defined by her religious involvement, frequency of prayer and perception of religion’s importance. Adamczyk said that this may be partially explained by the evidence that personal religiosity delays the timing of first sex, thereby shortening the period of time in which religious women are sexually active outside of marriage.

Despite the absence of a link between personal religious devotionand abortion, religious affiliation did have some important influence. Adamczyk found that conservative Protestants (which includes evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians) were the least likely to report having an abortion, less likely than mainline Protestants, Catholics and women with non-Christian religious affiliations.

Regarding the impact of the religious involvement of a woman’s peers, Adamczyk found no significant influence. However, Adamczyk did find that women who attended school with conservative Protestants were more likely to decide to have an extramarital baby in their 20s than in their teenage years.

“The values of conservative Protestant classmates seem to have an abortion limiting effect on women in their 20s, but not in their teens, presumably because the educational and economic costs of motherhood are reduced as young women grow older,” Adamczyk said.

The LA Times also picked up on the story in their Health section this week. They report: 

In a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, a sociologist at the City University of New York analyzed the abortion decisions of unmarried teenagers and young twentysomethings. Specifically, she was looking at how those decisions were affected by personal religious devotion, schoolmates’ religious devotion and the type of school (public or religious).

Come decision-making time, religiosity —  the importance attributed to religion and the involvement in it — didn’t make much difference.

Maybe that’s surprising to you, maybe not.

But of note, she writes: “Conservative Protestants appear less likely to obtain abortions than mainline Protestants, Catholics, and women of non-Christian faiths. Regardless of personal religious affiliation, having attended a school with a high proportion of conservative Protestants appears to discourage abortion as women enter their twenties. Conversely, women from private religious high schools appear
more likely to report obtaining an abortion than women from public schools.”

Read more from MSNBC.

Read more from the LA Times. 

Earlier this week USA Today ran several articles  on the tenth anniversary of the school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. They called upon several sociologists to talk about how the Columbine shootings changed the culture of American high schools.

The first featured work from sociologist Katherine Newman…

School shooters almost always tell classmates of their plans, so schools should provide “confidential avenues for reporting what they hear,” says Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, who co-authored Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. It’s tough to get teenagers to “tell,” since creating a social culture apart from adults is so important to adolescent development, Newman says. But if adults guarantee confidentiality, results can be dramatic. Examples:

•Colorado has a Safe2Tell anonymous tipline that covers any potential threat to safety. The program also includes anonymous and encrypted Web-tipping, says Susan Payne, special agent in charge of school safety and homeland security for the state. In the past 4½ years, the line has prevented 28 planned school attacks, she says. In one incident, there were 33 weapons found. About two-thirds of the calls come from kids, Payne says. “All of us have seen these unspeakable tragedies. I can’t think of one that could not have been prevented.”

•Safe School Ambassadors is a program created by the non-profit Community Matters in 2000. It has trained staff at more than 650 schools in 23 states on how to set up so-called ambassadors — influential student leaders of varied cliques who learn how to squelch minor fires of bullying and other behaviors, and to report potential rampages.

The second highlighted sociologist David Osher…

The Secret Service found that 71% of shooters they studied felt “persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others.” In several cases, they’d experienced school bullying and harassment that was “long-standing and severe.”

“These kids didn’t pick the local movie theater to blow people away, and there’s a reason they picked school,” says David Osher, a sociologist and vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

Schools that tolerate lots of bullying and look the other way from petty acts of violence are more vulnerable to escalating violence, including rampages from shooters, he says.

And where relations between teachers and kids with emotional problems are harsh or distant, violence becomes more likely.

“These are rage shootings,” he says, “kids suffering from depression largely creating public suicides in school environments where they feel alienated.”

Read more on how ‘Post-Columbine Programs Help Prevent Rampages.’

Read more on ‘Lessons from Columbine.’

United Press International issued a release this morning about new findings on the spread of AIDS across sub-Saharan Africa, out of Penn State University.

A U.S. sociologist says increased schooling across sub-Saharan Africa might be lowering the number of new HIV infections among younger adults.

If that is true, Penn State University Professor David Baker says it would suggest a shift in a decades-long trend in which a formal education was considered an AIDS risk factor.

“Before the 1990s, in the impoverished regions of sub-Saharan Africa, even modest amounts of education afforded males higher income, more leisure time and, for some males, greater access to commercial sex workers,” said Baker. “HIV-infected higher-status males then spread the infection to both educated and uneducated women, which moved the disease into the general population.”

Baker and graduate students John Collins and Juan Leon report their research findings in the U.N. journal Prospects.

Read more.

Yesterday USA Today reported on new research out of Michigan State University suggesting that many students who apply for and receive early admission to the college of their choice regret the decision. The newspaper presents this study as further evidence that high school students should avoid the early-admission rush so they will not regret the decision later in life.

Bad timing is the culprit. “Many young people are being pressured to making college choices before they are developmentally ready,” says Michigan State University sociologist Barbara Schneider, author of a report released today that examines the psychological and social implications of admission policies. Though she says that case “has yet to be made empirically,” she cites her forthcoming research suggesting “students who make these choices very early, without having opportunities to explore other options, (in their 20s) report some dissatisfaction with their college choices and lives.”

Although it looks as though this needs to be fleshed-out more before any definitive claims can be made, USA Today found additional anecdotal support for the idea…

David Hawkins of the non-profit National Association for College Admission Counseling says the findings support some members’ concerns that students are being rushed. The group’s 2005 survey found that 25% of responding colleges accept some applicants before they start their senior year. Some recruiters have waived application fees or offered priority housing to students who apply as juniors. The group now bars colleges from admitting a student until after they get a junior year transcript. Harvard, Stanford and other selective schools have softened binding early-admission policies so that admitted students could apply elsewhere, too.

Read more.

Famous Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman made headlines recently for his academic pursuits. A sociology degree of all things! And according to the Dallas Morning News, one of his remaining courses at UCLA was on race and ethnicity…

The Associated Press reports:

The Hall of Fame quarterback says he’s passed his two final college courses and will graduate in June from UCLA — 20 years after he left for the NFL. The Dallas Morning News reported Tuesday that Aikman is getting a bachelor’s degree in sociology and will participate in UCLA’s graduation ceremonies. The 42-year-old Fox Sports broadcaster says he’s “finally taking care of unfinished business.”

The Dalls Morning News noted:

Aikman had planned to make the walk two decades earlier. But the matter of the April 1989 NFL draft came along. The Cowboys insisted that the first player selected get to Dallas as soon as possible to help rejuvenate their floundering franchise. The two sociology classes he was going to take that spring quarter would have to wait. Aikman never dreamt graduation would be delayed 20 years.

“Finally taking care of unfinished business,” Aikman said Monday, explaining why he took the necessary courses to secure his degree. “It was important to me.”

For this famous sociology major, I can’t help but wonder… why sociology?