education

This weekend is commencement at my college, Occidental, and I thought it the perfect day to post new data on the job experiences of recent graduates.  The data, a survey of 444 people in who graduated between 2007 and 2011, comes from a report out of Rutgers.

Just over half of the sample had a full-time job; 12% were un- or underemployed and looking for full-time work.

The recession appears to have depressed earnings by about $3,000. Pre-recession grads were making, on average, $30,000, while post-recession grads took in $27,000:

A third of students (35%) reported that their first job out of college was “not at all related” or “not very closely related” to their major. Almost half saw their first job as temporary and just “to get you by” (though this would drop to 36% when asked about their current job). Only half thought that their first job required a college degree.

A significant proportion of students felt that they’d had to sacrifice something important to secure their job: 27% reported that they were working below their level of education, 24% took a job that paid less than they expected to earn, and 23% were working outside of their interests and training:

Many graduates would have done things differently. Notably a third said they would have re-thought their choice of major:

And most of them would have been more likely to have chosen a professional major (e.g., education or nursing) or one in a “STEM” field (e.g., science, technology, engineering, or math).

Recession-era grads are much more likely to be getting help from their parents, compared to pre-recession grads:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In her excellent article “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families,” Annette Lareau looks at differences in childrearing strategies, finding that class differences were more important than racial differences. Lareau argued that childrearing methods are one way in which class-based advantages are reproduced. Middle-class parents use a “concerted cultivation” model, which involved high levels of involvement in extracurricular activities. Working-class parents engaged in what Lareau calls an “accomplishment of natural growth” model, which emphasizes loving children and providing for them and giving children much more leisure time that is self-directed and unstructured. As Lareau writes,

Working-class and poor children spent most of their free time in informal play; middle-class children took part in many adult-organized activities designed to develop their individual talents and interests. (p. 761).

There are downsides to the concerted cultivation model. The range of activities children are involved in “dominate family life and create enormous labor, particularly for mothers” (p. 748). The emphasis on organized activities led to generally weak family ties, as well as weak social ties more generally, since they were based on participation in activities (extracurricular sports, classes, etc.) that have high turnover rates in membership and often last a few weeks regardless. However, Lareau argues that the concerted cultivation model ultimately transmits class advantages, given that the behaviors and assumptions it socializes children into prepare them well for a social world dominated by other middle-class professionals. And she argues that these different models are not just based on preferences; existing class inequalities make it much more difficult for working-class parents to follow the concerted cultivation model:

Enrollment fees that middle-class parents dismissed as “negligible” were formidable expenses for less affluent families…Moreover, families needed reliable private transportation and flexible work schedules to get children to and from events. These resources were disproportionately concentrated in middle-class families. (p. 771)

The Russel Sage foundation recently posted a graph that highlights class differences in spending on activities and products meant to aid child development, learning, and general enrichment. The graph, from Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, shows how the gap in spending on such items — which includes things such as tutoring, private schooling, summer camps, high-quality childcare, and computers — has grown between the poorest and wealthiest Americans in recent decades, illustrating Lareau’s argument about differential access to the products and activities central to the concerted cultivation model:

Full cites:

Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane. 2011. Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane. NY: Russell Sage. [Graph from p. 11.]

Annette Lareau. 2002. “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families.” American Sociological Review 67(5): 747-776.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

W.W. Norton released a couple two-minute interviews in which I talk about hook up culture, part of their collection of academics talking about their research.

In the first clip, I discuss the difference between hooking up and a hook up “culture.”  In the second, I respond to the concern that there is something “wrong” with casual sex on college campuses.  There is something wrong, I argue, but it’s not unique to casual sex. Instead, the problems students face on campus — heterosexism, gender inequality, and a relentless pressure to be “hot” — don’t go away with graduation.

In that sense, for better or worse, college is a “functional training ground” for the friendships, marriages, workplace interactions, and other types relationships that students will encounter after college; social inequalities threaten the health of all of these relationships.  Instead of shaking our fingers at college students, then, we should recognize that the acute problems we see on campuses are symptoms of the ills that characterize our wider sexual culture as well.

I’m speaking about hook up culture at Harvard and Dartmouth this week. If you’re in the area, please come by and say “hello!”

• Monday, Mar. 26th at 8:00pm: “Sex Lives and Sex Lies: Hooking Up on Campus” (Harvard University, Science Center D)
• Wednesday, Mar. 28th at 7:30pm: “Sex Machines vs. Sex Objects: How Stereotypes Subvert Sexual Pleasure” (Harvard University, Fong Auditorium)
• Thursday, Mar. 29th at 4:30pm: “The Promise & Perils of the Hook-Up Culture”  (Dartmouth University, Rockefeller Center “Rocky” 2)

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

In 1994, Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur published, Growing Up With A Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. The growth of children living with only their mothers was — then as now — a matter of concern not only for children’s well-being, but for intergenerational mobility. One of their empirical conclusions was this:

For children living with a single parent and no stepparent, income is the single most important factor in accounting for their lower well-being as compared with children living with both parents. It accounts for as much as half of their disadvantage. Low parental involvement, supervision, and aspirations and greater residential mobility account for the rest.

The biggest problem, in other words, is economic. The other factors —  involvement, supervision, aspirations, mobility — are related to social class and the time poverty that economically-poor parents experience.

Examples

Here are some bivariate illustrations — that is, head-to-head comparisons of the difference between children of poor and non-poor versus single and married parents.

These are the “skill group” rankings by teachers of children by socioeconomic status (or SES, a composite of parents’ education, occupational prestige and income) versus race/ethnicity, gender and family structure. SES shows the widest spread in reading teachers’ group placement of first graders.

Source: Condron (2007)

Similarly, the poor/nonpoor difference is greater than the two-parent/single-parent difference in kindergarten entry scores:

Source: Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (2009)

Those are just two examples from early-childhood assessments. More importantly, here is the breakdown seen in a longitudinal study of children growing up. When women grow up to be mothers, their poverty level in childhood is more important than their family structure for predicting whether they will be in poverty themselves. The poverty difference is large, the family structure difference is not:

Source: Musik & Mare (2006)

This study included a more sophisticated set of multivariate analyses than this simple graph, but the author’s conclusion fits it:

Net of the correlation between poverty and family structure within a generation, the intergenerational transmission of poverty is significantly stronger than the intergenerational transmission of family structure, and neither childhood poverty nor family structure affects the other in adulthood.

That is, childhood poverty matters more.

Fewer single parents, or less poverty?

But if single parenthood and poverty are so closely related, some people say, we should spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting marriage to help children avoid poverty (and other problems). That’s what the government has done, with money from the welfare budget. Even if it worked, which it apparently doesn’t, it’s only one approach. What about reducing poverty? And, more specifically, reducing the relative likelihood of poverty in single-parent families versus those with married parents. That is, address the poverty gap between the two groups, rather than the size of the two groups. This has the added advantage of not singling out one group — single mothers — for social stigmatization (of the kind I mentioned here). And, because it defines the problem as economic rather than moral, may make it easier to build public support for helping the poor.

Consider a recent paper by David Brady and Rebekah Burroway, which will be published in Demography. They analyzed the relative poverty of single mothers versus the total population — that is, what percentage had incomes below half the median (per person, after accounting for taxes and government transfers). Such a relative poverty measure is really a measure of inequality, but specifically inequality at the low end. (Regardless of how rich the rich are, it’s theoretically possible to have no one below half the median income). Here is my graph showing that result, with only the countries that have reliable sample sizes in the survey:

The Nordic countries have the lowest overall poverty rates. But in absolute terms their advantage is much bigger for single mothers. (The red line shows equal poverty rates for single mothers and the total population.) The US and UK have the largest difference in poverty rates between single mothers and overall poverty. That is, we have the largest poverty penalty for single motherhood. If the relative poverty rates for single mothers were lower in the US, we might spend more time and money addressing poverty and less trying to change family structures.

Cross-posted at The Russell Sage Foundation.

Claude Steele and his colleagues have found ample evidence of “stereotype threat” in test-taking situations.  Stereotype threat occurs when people worry that poor performance on a task will inadvertently confirm a negative stereotype applied to the group to which they belong.  Their worry depresses performance, thus creating outcomes consistent with the stereotype. Stereotype threat depresses the performance of high-achieving African American students on difficult verbal tests as well as accomplished female math students on difficult math tests.

Not all stereotypes are negative, however, suggesting that certain stereotypes might also enhance performance.  With Min Zhou, I looked into how the stereotype that Asian Americans students are particularly smart and high achieving — as illustrated in this TIME magazine cover from 1987 — might shape their performances.

We argue that Asian American students benefit from a “stereotype promise”—the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby enhancing performance.  The Chinese- and Vietnamese-Americans students we studied described how their teachers assumed that they were smart, hard-working, and high-achieving, which affected the way that their teachers treated them, the grades they received, and their likelihood of being placed into the most competitive academic tracks, like Advanced Placement (AP) and Honors. For many students, stereotype promise exerted an independent effect, and boosted performance.

For example, Ophelia is a 23 year-old second-generation Vietnamese woman who described herself as “not very intelligent” and recalls nearly being held back in the second grade. By her account, “I wasn’t an exceptional student; I was a straight C student, whereas my other siblings, they were quicker than I was, and they were straight A students.”

Despite Ophelia’s C average, she took the AP exam at the end of junior high school, and not surprisingly, failed. Nevertheless, she was placed into the AP track in high school, but once there, something “just clicked,” and Ophelia began to excel in her classes. When we asked her to explain what she meant by this, she elaborated, “I wanted to work hard and prove I was a good student,” and also added, “I think the competition kind of increases your want to do better.” She graduated from high school with a GPA of 4.2, and was admitted into a highly competitive pharmacy program.

Once she was placed in a more challenging setting, then, where teachers’ expectations and peer performance were elevated, she benefited from stereotype promise. Ophelia did not believe at the outset that she was academically exceptional or deserving of being in the AP track (especially because she earned straight C’s in junior high school and failed the AP exam), but once anointed as academically exceptional and deserving, the stereotype promise exerted an independent effect that encouraged her to try harder and prove that she was a good student, and ultimately enhanced her performance.  While it is impossible to know how Ophelia’s academic performance would have differed had she stayed on the school’s “regular track,” that she was given the opportunity to meet her potential attests to the advantage that Asian American students are accorded in the context of U.S. schools.

In future research, I plan to study in what institutional contexts “stereotype promise” may emerge, for which groups, and in what domains. For example, males may benefit from stereotype promise in certain occupational niches where stereotypes about gender and performance prevail.

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Jennifer Lee is a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in intersection of immigration and race and ethnicity. She wrote, with Frank Bean, a book called The Diversity Paradox, that examines patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans.

Read a Q&A on with Jennifer Lee about “stereotype promise” at the Russell Sage Foundation.

In an earlier post we reviewed research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showing that income inequality contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust.

She summarizes these findings in this quick nine-minute talk at a Green Party conference:

See Dr. Pickett making similar arguments as to why raising the average national income in developed countries doesn’t make people happier or enable them to live longer, why unequal societies are more violent, and how status inequality increases stress.

And see more about income inequality and national well-being at Equality Trust.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The mysterious SocProf, who writes The Global Sociology Blog, offered a nice review of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett‘s book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.  Wilkinson and Pickett offer transnational research showing how, exactly, income inequality is related to bad outcomes on average.  In other words, as SocProf puts it, “…egalitarianism is not a bleeding heart’s wet dream but rather the only rational course of action in terms of public policy.”  The 11 graphs, available at the Equality Trust website, speak for themselves.

Societies with more income inequality have higher infant death rates than other societies:

Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of mental illness than other societies:

Societies with more income inequality have a higher incidence of drug use than other societies:

Societies with more income inequality have a higher high school drop out rate than other societies:

Societies with more income inequality imprison a larger proportion of their population than other societies:

Societies with more income inequality have a higher rate of obesity than other societies:

Individuals in societies with more income inequality are less likely to be in a different class than their parents compared to other societies:

Individuals in societies trust others less than people in other societies:

Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of homicide than other societies:

Societies with more income inequality give less in foreign aid than other societies:

Children in societies with more income inequality do less well than children in other societies:

The authors sum it up pretty simply: : “Th[e] dissatisfaction [measured in this data is] a cost which the rich impose on the rest of society.”

And they have a clear policy proposal relevant to the current economic crisis.

[This is] a clear warning for those who might want to place low public expenditure and taxation at the top of their priorities. If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prison and more police. You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problems. If keeping taxes and benefits down leads to wider income differences, the need to deal with ensuing social ills may  force you to raise public expenditure to cope.

Readers Ana and Dmitriy T.M. sent in a TED talk of Richard Wilkinson discussing the relationship between income inequality and social problems:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In my opinion, there is no way to administer a math test that will identify inborn ability. So people who think the greater presence of men in high-end math and science positions is a result of the distribution of inborn abilities generally rely on the observation of (a) big gender gaps, (b) long-standing gender gaps, or (c) widespread gender gaps, to make their case.

Big gaps (a) are only useful for creating a big impression. Long-standing gaps (b) are undermined by the scale of change in recent decades. And a new study does a very nice job weakening type-C support.

In “Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance,” in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Jonathan Kane and Janet Mert study variation both between and within countries to test a variety of hypotheses about the sources male math advantage. They look at the distribution and variance in scores, the association with single-gender schooling, religious context and, most importantly, broader patterns of gender inequality. The main message I get is that gender ability in math differs so much across social contexts that any conclusion about “natural” ability is untenable. Also, gender equality is good.

Here’s my favorite figure from the paper, showing the distribution of eighth-grade scores for boys and girls in three countries:

In the Czech Republic there is no difference in either the means or the distributions for boys versus girls, and the average ability is high. Bahrain shows a much greater variance for boys versus girls — which is sometimes used to explain why to many top achievers are men — but women’s average is higher. Finally, in Tunisia the girls have a higher variance but a lower mean. Where’s the natural ability story?

An important consideration in all of these patterns is the role of selective dropouts. That is a potential problem with any school-based test, but also shows the problem with using any test of school-based knowledge to understand underlying “natural” ability (including SATs). Unless you can test populations with no schooling, or identical schooling experiences, you can’t resolve this.

In the meantime, the great social variability shows us that context matters, and since that’s something we can definitely address, there is no reason to get hung up on the biological stuff — at least as far as policy and practice are concerned.

Here’s a previous post from me on how teacher interactions affect gender patterns of learning, and another writeup on the new study from ScienceBlogs.