{"id":67084,"date":"2015-06-04T09:33:15","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T14:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=67084"},"modified":"2015-06-02T15:41:16","modified_gmt":"2015-06-02T20:41:16","slug":"social-class-divides-the-futures-of-high-school-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/06\/04\/social-class-divides-the-futures-of-high-school-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Class Divides the Futures of High School Students"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is new research from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES),\u00a0written up<\/a> by\u00a0Susan Dynarsky at the New York Times<\/em> Upshot. The striking finding is that poor children\u00a0in the top<\/em> quartile on\u00a0high school math scores have a 41% chance of finishing a BA degree by their late twenties \u2014 the same chance as children\u00a0from the second-lowest<\/em> quartile in math scores who are high-socioeconomic status (SES). Poor children\u00a0from the third-highest quartile in high school math have graduation about equal to the worst-scoring children form the richest group. Here\u2019s the figure:<\/p>\n

\"777\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The headline on the figure is misleading, actually, since SES is not measured by wealth, but by a combination of parental education, occupation, and income. (Low<\/em> here means the bottom quartile of SES, Middle<\/em> is the 25th to 75th percentile, and High<\/em> is 75th and up.)<\/p>\n

One possible mechanism for the disparity in college completion rates is education expectations. Dynarsky mentions expectations measured in the sophomore year of high school, which was 2002 for this cohort. What she doesn\u2019t mention is how much those expectations changed<\/em> by senior year. Going to the NCES source for that data (here<\/a>) I found this chart, which I annotated in red:<\/p>\n

\"Print\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Between sophomore and senior year, the percentage expecting to finish a BA degree or more decreased and the percentage expecting to go to two-year college increased, across SES levels.\u00a0But the change was much greater for lower SES\u00a0students. So the gap in expecting to go to two-year college between high- and low-SES students grew\u00a0from 6 to 17 percentage points; that is, from 9% versus 3% in the sophomore year to 22% versus 6% in the senior year.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a big crushing of expectations that happened in the formative years at the end of high school.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He writes the blog\u00a0Family Inequality<\/a>\u00a0and is the author of <\/em>The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change<\/a>. You can follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is new research from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES),\u00a0written up by\u00a0Susan Dynarsky at the New York Times Upshot. The striking finding is that poor children\u00a0in the top quartile on\u00a0high school math scores have a 41% chance of finishing a BA degree by their late twenties \u2014 the same chance as children\u00a0from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":67087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,29,34,329],"class_list":["post-67084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-class","tag-education","tag-emotion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/06\/32.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67084"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67090,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67084\/revisions\/67090"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}