education

Two additional cases of a boy being subject to schools rules that don’t apply to girls prompts a re-post. I’ve added the new instances to the end.

Tara C. sent us a link to a story about a 4-year-old boy who has been given in-school suspension (and was threatened with expulsion) for having hair that breaks the dress code for the Dallas, TX, school system:

Dmitriy T.M. sent in another story, this one featuring a 6-year-old named Gareth who was being placed into in-school suspension (i.e., spending all day each day in the principal’s office) because of his long hair and earring.

So, this still you see of him below… that’s what counts as long hair. And, can you spot the earring in his left ear? It’s there.

In another case, 16-year-old Kasey Landrum was suspended for wearing eye-liner on school grounds (after classes were out):

Of course, these aren’t just about enforcing a dress code. It’s a gendered code; girls aren’t required to have short hair cuts, because on girls, longer hair isn’t “distracting,” it’s “normal.”  As is make-up and earrings.  Implicit in the idea of what counts as an appropriate appearance, then, is the gender of the person wearing it.  These cases reveal, further, that girls are allowed more choices than boys because we are more accepting of girls acting boyish than boys acting girlish (in what sociologists call “androcentrism“).

The final case also reveals the importance of intersectionality, or the way that different identities come together in complicated ways. Landrum claims that an ostensibly heterosexual boy was allowed to wear punk-style make-up to school on the same day.  So breaking gender rules is apparently okay if you affirm that you’re heterosexual, and maybe being gay is okay if you don’t break any gender rules, but doing both is going too far.

Economist Michael Mandel, at Mandel on Innovation and Growth, posted these two figures showing that the real earnings of college graduates (full-time workers ages 25-34) have been declining since before the recession. According to Mandel:

• Real earnings for young male college grads are down 19% since their peak in 2000.
• Real earnings for young female college grads are down 16% since their peak in 2003.

Mandel poses the following questions:

…no one has given me a good explanation yet of why young American college grads should have been hit so hard. Is there increased competition with young college grads around the world?  Are new college grads lower quality than their predecessors? Has information technology reduced the need for young grads? I really would like to know.

For more depressing news about the earnings of college graduates, see these posts on how the economic recession will depress the earnings of college grads for their entire lifetime and a look at the trend in college graduate earnings since 1979.

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.

Affirmative action policies in higher education help mediate the real race-based disadvantages that some minorities face, above and beyond class-based disadvantages that are faced by people of color and whites alike.  They have a nefarious dark side, though; a dark side that causes even people who otherwise support affirmative action to question the approach to alleviating racial inequality.  They sometimes undermine the self-confidence of minorities admitted into college, as this PostSecret confession suggests:

College students often have a pretty poor understanding of admissions processes.  In the absence of any real information, it’s easy to let stereotypes and biases inform beliefs about how any individual student got into college.  A student of color, then, may be viewed as less-deserving of admission regardless of their grades, test scores, and extra-curricular activities.

More perniciously, they may question their own qualifications for admission, even when they have significantly out-performed their white peers.

A simple message to college students of color, for what it’s worth:

Your institution accepted you because they thought you could succeed.  Period.  You belong in college.

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.

Super thanks to Rebecca Pardo for inviting me to be part of a segment on hook up culture for MTV News!  She and her team did such a wonderful job of editing and illustrating the interview.  I’m so tickled to be on MTV and excited to share it here!

The gist? College students are having sex, but not as much as you might think. And most of them are kind of disappointed about the whole thing. All in three minutes!

For a longer and decidedly less MTV-y approach to this topic, feel free to watch a 40-minute version of the talk taped at Franklin and Marshall College (slideshow and transcript if you’d rather read).

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.

Everyone says that they want an economic recovery.  So, why don’t we have one?  Most surveys of business people tell the same story: there is no recovery because business owners are unwilling to hire and they are unwilling to hire because people are not spending.

So, why aren’t people spending?  One reason is that many people are unemployed.  Another reason, one that business leaders doesn’t like to discuss, is that business has been boosting its profits by cutting worker pay.  And not just for the less educated who are said to be the unfortunate victims of technology and globalization.  Rather, as the chart below shows, for workers in almost all educational categories.

The average earnings of workers in almost all educational categories declined between 2000 and 2010.  Talk about a lost decade for working people!  Only those with an MD, JD, MBA or PhD enjoyed a real increase over the period, and those workers make up only 3% of the workforce.

The average earnings of college graduates, 19.5% of the workforce, declined (adjusted for inflation) by approximately 8%.  Interestingly, the average earnings of high school graduates, 30.7% of the workforce, actually suffered a smaller decline.

These numbers make clear that the solution to our economic problems is not more education.  Even those with Masters Degrees lost money on average.  Recovery will require real structural change in the way our economy operates.

There are few social facts that spread themselves out evenly across social class. Most everything — how healthy we are, what we do for leisure, how we dress, etc — is correlated with income.  Twitter, I learned today, is an exception.   According to a Pew study, internet users across a wide array of income brackets are using Twitter at about the same rate.

Income and % of internet users who use Twitter:

When we look at variables that correlate with income, however, such as race and education, we see an uneven distribution.

Race and % of internet users who use Twitter:

Education and % of internet users who use Twitter:

So people with more education are more likely to use Twitter, but Whites (who, on average, get more education than Blacks and Hispanics) are less likely.  There’s something really interesting going on here.  Any idea what?

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.

College is a good investment. Yes, still.  But, as this graph sent in by Deeb shows, entry level wages for college graduate, controlled for inflation, have shown quite a bit of variance over the last 30 years.  Starting salaries are consequential.  For many jobs raises are calculated as a proportion of your existing salary, such that starting salaries have cumulative effects over the lifetime.

Today’s college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute, will have an average starting salary of $1.00 less than ten years ago:

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.

Whether you are in college or not, fall semester 2011 is upon us. Below, courtesy of Everyday Sociology, is a graph illustrating the rising cost of college, controlled for inflation.

Public College/University Tuition, Room and Board (held constant in 2007-2008 dollars):

Consequent to this increase, the average student in 2008 graduated with twice the debt as a student in 1996, from $12,750 to $23,200.

The pay-off of a college education, however, is higher than ever. So why don’t more people go?

In the seven-and-a-half minute video below, UC Berkeley Professor Michael Hout gives a history of higher education putting all of this in perspective. The answer is class-specific and how different classes think about debt and possibility. More:

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.