Should Mom go back to school? Post-natal educational attainment and parenting practices

Although the relationship between educational attainment and parenting practices is well documented, it is typically examined at only one point in time. What happens if mothers acquire more education after the birth of their children: do they alter their parenting practices? Panel data models based on longitudinal data from ECLS-K indicate that changes in mother’s educational attainment are positively associated with increases in parental school involvement, having books in the home, and participating in non-academic family activities, but not with attitudes toward discipline. Although post-natal maternal education does not change all aspects of parenting, our findings are broadly consistent with the theory of cultural mobility and provide insights into the extent of socio-cultural mobility in contemporary American society.     

Family structure and the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage

I examine whether the effect of parents’ education on children’s educational achievement and attainment varies by family structure and, if so, whether this can be explained by differential parenting practices. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I find that as parents’ education increases, children in single mother families experience a lower boost in their achievement test scores, likelihood of attending any post-secondary schooling, likelihood of completing a 4-year college degree, and years of completed schooling relative to children living with both biological parents. Differences in parents’ educational expectations, intergenerational closure, and children’s involvement in structured leisure activities partially explain these status transmission differences by family structure. The findings imply that, among children with highly educated parents, children of single mothers are less likely to be highly educated themselves relative to children who grow up with both biological parents.     

Does death really make us equal? Educational attainment and resource compensation after paternal death in Finland

Attempts to explain the persistent importance of family background for children's educational attainment typically highlight the ways in which parents pass down educational, economic and social resources to their children. However, parental resources may also play a crucial role for preventing family crises from spiraling into cumulative disadvantage. To study such compensation processes, we examine the consequences of a father's death on children's educational trajectories, using a Finnish register-based sample of children born between 1982 and 1987. The results based on multilevel linear probability models both support and contradict our compensation hypothesis. Children who lost their father were not more likely to drop out of upper secondary school, as long as their surviving mother had high levels of socioeconomic resources. Similar compensation processes were visible in the case of entering polytechnic higher education. However, with regard to university attendance, bereavement noticeably reduced the traditional advantage of children with high-resource parents.     

Incomplete equalization: The effect of tracking in secondary education on educational inequality

This paper tests whether the existence of vocationally oriented tracks within a traditionally academically oriented upper education system reduces socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment. Based on a statistical model of educational transitions and data on two entire cohorts of Danish youth, we find that (1) the vocationally oriented tracks are less socially selective than the traditional academic track; (2) attending the vocationally oriented tracks has a negative effect on the likelihood of enrolling in higher education; and (3) in the aggregate the vocationally oriented tracks improve access to lower-tier higher education for low-SES students. These findings point to an interesting paradox in that tracking has adverse effects at the micro-level but equalizes educational opportunities at the macro-level. We also discuss whether similar mechanisms might exist in other educational systems.     

Mexican parent's undocumented status and the educational attainment of the children left behind

Research shows that having undocumented parents lowers the educational attainment of children that grew up in the United States, but we know less about how it affects the education of children left behind in their origin countries. We use fixed effects models and data from the Mexican Migration Project to examine this relationship. We find that having both parents documented increases the educational attainment of children left behind by over two years in comparison to similar children with mixed-status, undocumented, and nonimmigrant parents. The effect is especially robust for boys that migrate as teenagers. These findings reveal that US immigration laws that define most Mexican immigrants as undocumented have had a devastating effect on the education of Mexican children left behind.     

The social and genetic inheritance of educational attainment: Genes,parental education,and educational expansion

Recently, several genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have found education-related genetic variants and enabled the integration of human inheritance into social research. This study incorporates the newest education polygenic score (Lee et al., 2018) into sociological research, and tests three gene-environment interaction hypotheses on status attainment. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7599), I report three findings. First, a standard deviation increase in the education polygenic score is associated with a 58% increase in the likelihood of advancing to the next level of education, while a standard deviation increase in parental education results in a 53% increase. Second, supporting the Saunders hypothesis, the genetic effect becomes 11% smaller when parental education is one standard deviation higher, indicating that highly educated parents are more able to preserve their family's elite status in the next generation. Finally, the genetic effect is slightly greater for the younger cohort (1942–59) than the older cohort (1920–41). The findings strengthen the existing literature on the social influences in helping children achieve their innate talents.     

The optimism trap: Migrants’ educational choices in stratified education systems

Immigrant children's ambitious educational choices have often been linked to their families' high level of optimism and motivation for upward mobility. However, previous research has mostly neglected alternative explanations such as information asymmetries or anticipated discrimination. Moreover, immigrant children's higher dropout rates at the higher secondary and university level suggest that low performing migrant students could have benefitted more from pursuing less ambitious tracks, especially in countries that offer viable vocational alternatives. We examine ethnic minority's educational choices using a sample of academically low performing, lower secondary school students in Germany's highly stratified education system. We find that their families' optimism diverts migrant students from viable vocational alternatives. Information asymmetries and anticipated discrimination do not explain their high educational ambitions. While our findings further support the immigrant optimism hypothesis, we discuss how its effect may have different implications depending on the education system.     

Education and religion: Individual, congregational, and cross-level interaction effects on biblical literalism

Using ideas from cultural and organizational theory, I examine the interplay of individual and congregation-level educational attainment on biblical literalism. Data on 387 congregations and 100,009 worshippers (US Congregational Life Survey, 2001) are used to test hypotheses. Results indicate that the effects of congregational education and individual educational attainment are among the largest effects in models. This study is the first to show that regardless of an individual’s own education, affirmations of biblical literalism are less likely when persons with higher education dominate a congregation. This finding brings into relief the important role of social context in persons’ belief in biblical literalism. Additionally, congregational education amplifies the influence of individual education on biblical literalism such that the gap in belief between college/non-college education individuals widens in high education congregations. This finding suggests that high education persons more deeply absorb the influence of a more educated congregational context.     

Skin color,sex, and educational attainment in the post-civil rights era

We assess the relationship between skin color and educational attainment for native-born non-Hispanic Black and White men and women, using data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study. CARDIA is a medical cohort study with twenty years of social background data and a continuous measure of skin color, recorded as the percent of light reflected off skin. For Black men and women, we find a one-standard-deviation increase in skin lightness to be associated with a quarter-year increase in educational attainment. For White women, we find an association approximately equal in magnitude to that found for Black respondents, and the pattern of significance across educational transitions suggests that skin color for White women is not simply a proxy for family background. For White men, any relationship between skin color and attainment is not robust and, analyses suggest, might primarily reflect differences in family background. Findings suggest that discrimination on the basis of skin color may be less specific to race than previously thought.     

Intergenerational effects of shifts in women’s educational distribution in South Korea: Transmission, differential fertility, and assortative mating

This study examines the intergenerational effects of changes in women’s education in South Korea. We define intergenerational effects as changes in the distribution of educational attainment in an offspring generation associated with the changes in a parental generation. Departing from the previous approach in research on social mobility that has focused on intergenerational association, we examine the changes in the distribution of educational attainment across generations. Using a simulation method based on Mare and Maralani’s recursive population renewal model, we examine how intergenerational transmission, assortative mating, and differential fertility influence intergenerational effects. The results point to the following conclusions. First, we find a positive intergenerational effect: improvement in women’s education leads to improvement in daughter’s education. Second, we find that the magnitude of intergenerational effects substantially depends on assortative marriage and differential fertility: assortative mating amplifies and differential fertility dampens the intergenerational effects. Third, intergenerational effects become bigger for the less educated and smaller for the better educated over time, which is a consequence of educational expansion. We compare our results with Mare and Maralani’s original Indonesian study to illustrate how the model of intergenerational effects works in different socioeconomic circumstances.     

Education and risky sex in Africa: Unraveling the link between women’s education and reproductive health behaviors in Kenya

Much research attention has been devoted to understanding the relationship between education and riskier sex-related behaviors and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. While in the early 1990s researchers found that increases in education were associated with a higher incidence of HIV/AIDS, this relationship appears to have reversed and better educated people, especially women, appear less likely to engage in riskier sex-related behaviors and have a lower incidence rate of HIV/AIDS. Our study begins to unravel the mechanisms that could explain why women’s educational attainment is associated with safer sex-related behaviors in sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from the 2003 Kenyan Demographic and Health Survey, we examine the potential mediating effects of HIV/AIDS knowledge, family planning discussions, gender empowerment, and husband’s education for explaining the relationship between education and age of first sex, casual sex, multiple sex partners, and condom use. We find that gender empowerment partially explains the relationship between education and age of first sex, and HIV/AIDS knowledge, husband’s education, and family planning discussions partially explain the relationship between education and condom use. We argue that gender inequality and lack of knowledge are likely to play a greater role in explaining the relationship between woman’s education and sex-related behaviors in sub-Saharan Africa than they do in more industrialized nations, where social capital explanations may have more explanatory power.     

Do grandparents matter? A multigenerational perspective on educational attainment in Taiwan

In response to the growing interest in multigenerational effects, we investigate whether grandparents’ education affects grandchildren’s transitions to academic high school and university in Taiwan. Drawing on social capital literature, we consider potential heterogeneity of the grandparent effect by parents’ characteristics and propose that grandparents’ education yields differential effects depending on parents’ education. Our results show tenuous effects of grandmother’s and grandfather’s years of schooling, net of parents’ education. However, the positive interaction effects between grandparents’ and parents’ years of schooling indicate that grandparents’ additional years of schooling are more beneficial to students with more educated parents than for students with less educated parents. The diverging gap in the likelihood of attending academic high school or university between students with parents in higher and lower ends of the educational hierarchy, along with increased levels of grandparents’ education, supports our hypothesis that grandparents’ education augments educational inequality by parents’ education.     

父母非农就业、外出打工与子女的教育获得

文章把父母的工作状态分为在家务农、在外打工和本地非农就业三种,考察三者及其他家庭变量对子女教育获得（经济支持、家庭辅导和对子女的教育期望）的影响。结论认为：一方面虽然不同职业状态的父母其子女的教育获得有很大差异,但和务农相比,外出打工和非农就业都会通过提高家庭收入增加对子女的经济支持,从而更有利于子女获得高中和大学的教育机会。另一方面,子女的教育获得极大地受到父母受教育程度的影响。尤其是母亲拥有较高学历和非农工作的农村家庭,其子女会受到更高的期望和更多的家庭辅导。因此在引导农民向城镇有序流动的同时,政府应该公平分配教育资源,并加快农村地区发展、鼓励农民本地非农就业。     

Immigrant and native financial well-being: The roles of place of education and race/ethnicity

Immigrants’ integration into U.S. society has occupied the interest of both scholars and the general public throughout the nation’s history. This paper draws on and refines dominance-differentiation theory to explore how immigrants’ place of education (whether they completed their education in the United States or abroad) and racial/ethnic status differentially affect their ability to integrate into U.S. society. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation and wealth attainment as an indicator of economic integration, this paper finds mixed evidence for dominance-differentiation theory. Foreign education is associated with lower wealth attainment and race/ethnicity serves as an important stratifying factor for blacks and Latinos; however, there is little support for the theory when comparing the wealth attainment of immigrants with their same-race/co-ethnic native-born peers. This paper concludes with a discussion of why place of education matters for wealth attainment in the United States and explores its implications for both educational and racial/ethnic stratification among U.S. immigrants.     

How do they do it? The immigrant paradox in the transition to adulthood

How do children of immigrants consistently outperform children of native-born U.S. parents, in spite of lower familial resources? Using the Transition to Adulthood Study of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, children of immigrant and native-born parents completing high school in 2005–13 are followed as they move into the young adult years. Children of immigrants are more likely to enroll in college, be employed or in school, and less likely to have a criminal record as young adults or to have a child than children of nonimmigrants. This is not a result of immigrant parentage but due primarily to greater parental educational expectations; immigrants enjoy a differential return to parental expectations for boys' college enrollment as well. Reading skills and activity patterns in the secondary school years also contribute to better outcomes. Children of immigrants are better able to translate their reading comprehension skills to college or employment later on.     

When children affect parents: Children’s academic performance and parental investment

Sociologists have extensively documented the ways that parent resources predict children’s achievement. However, less is known about whether and how children’s academic performance shapes parental investment behaviors. I use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) and longitudinal fixed effects models to examine how changes in teacher assessments are related to changes in the conferral of various parent resources. Overall, I find that the relationship between achievement and investment varies based on the directionality in children’s achievement and the type of resource at hand. Children whose performance improves receive a broad range of enrichment resources, while declines in performance are met with corrective educational resources. Results are largely consistent whether language or math assessments are used to predict investment, and also among children whose achievement does not change over time. I discuss these patterns, along with implications for the use of parent resources in education and family research.     

马克思主义生态观与高校生态文明教育

马克思主义生态观是关于人与自然之间辩证关系的总体看法和根本观点,包含着人与自然、人与社会、人与人、人与自我和谐的重要主题,这对我国高校开展生态文明教育具有重要的理论指导。高校生态文明教育应以马克思主义生态观为指导,同时遵循科学性、综合性、实践性、发展性等原则,以确保教育目标实现。     

Education, gender, and migration in the context of social change

Although sociologists have identified education as likely determinant of migration, the ways in which education affects migration are unclear and empirical results are disparate. This paper addresses the relationship between educational attainment, enrolment, and migration, focusing on the role of gender and how it changes with evolving social contexts. Using empirical analyses based in Nepal, results indicate that educational attainment has positive effects and enrolment has negative effects on out-migration and including enrolment in the model increases the effect of attainment. In the case of women, with the changing role of gender, increased education and labor force participation, the affect of educational attainment changes drastically over time, from almost no effect, to a strong positive effect. Consideration of enrolment, and the role of gender in education, employment, and marriage may help to explain the disparate results in past research on education and migration.     

Vocational education: A clean slate for disengaged students?

Students’ social psychological adjustment to school is an important determinant of achievement growth as well as school continuation and post-secondary educational attainment. Yet many students begin high school with low levels of efficacy and self-worth, and low levels of identification with and liking of school. In this study, we investigate the hypothesis that vocational education in high school provides disengaged students with an educational clean slate, leading to a recovery of engagement for at-risk students. Using propensity score models, we assess the relationship between vocational course taking and changes in effort, extracurricular participation, sense of belonging, interest in school, attitudes toward school and teachers, educational expectations, career aspirations, locus of control, and self-concept with the NELS:88 database.     

教育民间组织在高等教育国际化中的作用及启示——以加拿大高等教育国际化发展为例

加拿大高等教育国际化的发展,证实了教育民间组织在高等教育国际化发展中的角色价值与推动作用。在我国高等教育国际化的进程中,应借鉴加拿大等发达国家高等教育的发展经验,针对高等教育发展中的实际问题,抓住"激发社会组织活力"及高校"去行政化"的改革机遇,通过立法,构建更开放的、更灵活的教育管理体制与机制,使更多具备社会性与国际性的教育民间组织积极参与推动,与世界共享无国界、无边界的教育资源,推动高等教育的国际化。