Occupational Aspirations,Gender, and Educational Attainment

While in the past women had lower educational attainment than men, women in recent years have caught up to and passed men in educational attainment. Lower occupational aspirations for women compared to men contributed to lower educational attainment in the past. In this article, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to consider whether occupational aspirations still act to lower educational attainment for women compared to men or whether occupational aspirations are currently an advantage for young women. We find that occupational aspirations are an advantage for women for high school graduation but not for college graduation.     

Family Size,Birth Order,and Educational Attainment

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between birth order and educational attainment measured at ages 7, 11, 16, and 23, with particular care taken to separate the effects of birth order from the effects of family size. Since eldest children benefit from their parents' undivided resources at an early age, theory predicts that they may do better educationally than later-born children. This is confirmed by the analysis in this paper, with eldest children performing significantly better than other children on almost all measures of attainment. Youngest children in large families perform less well than middle children, and this effect increases with the age of the child. These findings are robust to the inclusion of a large set of background controls.     

Social Closure and Educational Attainment

This article examines how network closure among parents affects adolescents’ educational attainment. First, we introduce a distinction between informal closure and school‐based closure. Second, we investigate whether and how the effect of informal and school‐based parental network closure varies across social contexts. Findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and multilevel models show that parental network closure modestly impacts educational outcomes. Moreover, educational benefits of informal closure in parent networks are contingent on social context. Closure only benefits educational attainment in low‐poverty schools. In high‐poverty schools, informal closure in parent networks lowers educational attainment. The social closure generated in informal connections among parents thereby contributes to the encapsulation of disadvantage in areas of concentrated poverty, which is not the case for school‐based closure.     

The Occupational Attainment of Immigrant Groups in Australia

It is commonly assumed that immigrants are disadvantaged in the Australian labour market because of a variety of interacting factors, some related to their skills, some to cultural differences between them and the host society, and some to the time it takes to adjust to their new circumstances. Using specially-prepared cross tabulations from the 1996 Australian Census, this article evaluates the assumption for the country's 52 largest immigrant groups, as defined by birthplace. Separate analyses for male and female immigrants relate their concentration in ten occupational groups, including unemployment, to their educational qualifications, facility with the English language, and period of arrival. The analyses suggest that the first two variables are particularly relevant to appreciating the occupational distribution of male immigrants, with period of arrival also being important for females, probably reflecting different cultural norms from their host society.     

Maternal Age and Offspring's Educational Attainment

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), the current study examines which maternal age at birth provides offspring with optimal opportunities for higher educational attainment. The results show that maternal age has a curvilinear relationship with offspring's educational attainment, that is, the offspring of younger and older mothers are distinctly disadvantaged. Maternal ages 31 through 40 are associated with the highest offspring educational attainment, suggesting that women who give birth in their 30s have more favorable characteristics than younger or older mothers. The analysis demonstrates that—with the exception of early teenage childbearing—the association between maternal age and offspring's educational attainment likely reflects selection patterns in fertility timing, rather than direct within‐family effects of maternal age on offspring's educational attainment. Thus, the results provide insufficient evidence to conclude that delaying childbearing beyond age 18 directly benefits or harms offspring's educational attainment.     

Between Two Worlds: Source‐Country Gender Roles and Gender Differences in Educational Attainment among Immigrant Children

Recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between source‐country characteristics such as female labor force participation, fertility, level of economic development, gender role attitudes, and immigrants’ labor market assimilation. These studies refer to national‐level factors when accounting for the vast differences in home‐country groups in labor market outcomes. This study asks to what extent these source‐country characteristics affect immigrant children's educational outcomes. Using data from the 2006 Canadian Census and World Values Survey, this article examines the extent to which the gender gap in educational attainment among immigrant children is associated with source‐country factors. Female child immigrants who come from countries with high female labor force participation and high levels of GDP have an advantage over their male counterparts in university education. Source‐country gender role ideology played a role in university completion rates for immigrant parents, but not for child immigrants.     

Divorce, Educational Attainment, and the Earnings Mobility of Sons

This article uses matched pairs of sons and their parents from the National Longitudinal Surveys: Old Cohort Databases to investigate the relationship between the marital history of parents, educational attainment, and intergenerational correlations in earnings. The research indicates that patterns of intergenerational earnings mobility vary with divorce. Sons from families whose divorced parents had relatively low earnings have a greater chance of having low earnings themselves. The research also shows that much of the variation in earnings mobility can be explained by lower educational attainment for children from divorced families. This finding highlights the importance of designing policies to assist the educational attainment of those most likely to be affected by divorce.     

Patterns of Immigrant Occupational Attainment in a Longitudinal Survey

This paper uses data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia to examine the empirical relevance of a model of immigrant occupational mobility. Consistent with the model, there is a U‐shaped pattern of occupational change from the pre‐immigration occupation through to the occupation held after three‐and‐a‐half years in Australia. The U is shallower for immigrants from countries similar to Australia than it is for immigrants from countries that differ more in language, occupational requirements, and labour market structure. The U‐shaped pattern is deeper for immigrants who are refugees than for family migrants and is the least deep for economic migrants.     

Educational Attainment and the Lesbian Wage Premium

This paper provides insight into the wage gap between lesbians and heterosexual women. Using data from the 2000 Decennial Census, we find a lesbian premium that equals approximately 10% for women without a bachelor’s degree, and is nearly non-existent for women with higher levels of education. These findings are consistent with proposition that the gap between lesbians’ and heterosexual women’s commitment to the labor market narrows at higher levels of education. We also find that controls for industry and occupation exert only a small effect on the gap between lesbian and heterosexual women’s wages.

Bridges and Barriers: Religion and Immigrant Occupational Attainment across Integration Contexts

This article advances knowledge about context‐dependent impacts of religion on immigrant structural integration. Drawing on theories of inter‐generational immigrant integration, it identifies and spells out two context‐dependent mechanisms through which religion impinges upon structural integration – as ethnic marker prompting exclusion and discrimination, or as social organization providing access to tangible resources. The propositions are empirically tested with nationally representative data on occupational attainment in three different integration contexts which vary in religious boundary configurations and religious field characteristics – the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Using data from the US General Social Survey, the Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey, and the European Social Survey, the article analyzes indirect and direct effects of religious affiliation and participation on occupational attainment among first and second generation immigrants. The analyses find only limited evidence for the assumption that in contexts with strong religious boundaries (such as Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, Canada), immigrants face religious penalties in structural integration. By contrast, the analyses support the assumption that in contexts with a thriving religious field (such as the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada), religious attendance tends to be positively related to occupational attainment, especially for the second generation. For the first time, the article empirically tests arguments about transatlantic differences in the role of religion for immigrant structural integration, and it suggests ways of better integrating micro‐oriented survey research with macro‐oriented institutional analysis.     

Educational Attainment and Stability in Long-Term Foster Care

SUMMARY. This paper explores the relationship between the reading attainment of a group of 8–14 year olds in long-term foster care and factors in their histories and current home environments. The findings suggest that children's early histories before entry to care may have an effect on their educational attainment in middle childhood. Some amelioration of early childhood experience may be found in a stable foster home placement which has an expectation of permanence. The type of permanent placement seems less important than the expectation of stability. There was no difference in progress between children where the eventual outcome might be adoption or custodianship and those who would remain foster children. Of especial interest was the fact that the foster children's educational attainment was not related either positively or negatively to contact with their birth parents.     

Poverty,Delinquency, and Educational Attainment: Cumulative Disadvantage or Disadvantage Saturation?

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) were analyzed to test two competing hypotheses regarding how poverty affects the relationship between delinquency and educational attainment. The cumulative-disadvantage perspective argues that poor youth suffer greater consequences for their involvement in delinquency than middle- and upper-class youth in terms of their educational attainment. Contrary to this perspective, the disadvantage-saturation thesis predicts that delinquency is less con-sequential for the educational attainment of poor youth than it is for nonpoor youth. Results from ordinary least squares and logistic regression analyses support the latter hypothesis. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.     

Suicide and Educational Attainment in a Transitional Society*

The sociological evidence available to date has not firmly established the relationship between suicide and social status. It is postulated here that societies in different stages of development may manifest different patterns of etiology of suicide, and thus the suicide rates of different social strata may change over time. Educational attainment is used as an indicator of social status, rather than “usual” occupations as in previous studies. From an analysis of a transitional society, it is concluded: first, the relation between suicide and social status is negative; and second, with coming societal changes, it is likely that the relation between suicide and social status will also change.     

The Immigrant Advantage in Adolescent Educational Expectations

Previous research has shown uniquely high expectations among children of immigrants. However, existing studies have not focused on why children of immigrants have an expectations advantage over their native‐born counterparts or if this has changed over time. This study shows that an immigrant advantage in graduate school expectations persists among adolescent children of immigrants today. Regression analyses reveal that this advantage is largely explained by higher parental expectations, greater interest in school, and foreign language use in early childhood. We argue that these factors can be conceptualized as forms of cultural capital stemming from unique aspects of the immigrant experience that are common across immigrant families.     

Teen Childbearing and Educational Attainment: A Comparison of Methods

This research examines the impact of teenage childbearing on secondary school completion, while focusing on the problem of causal ambiguity in the relationships among self-determined behaviours. Techniques for dealing with the teenage childbearing problem are discussed, and results from these methods are compared. Data from the High School and Beyond Study on young women (n = 5257) who were enrolled as sophomores in sample schools in February 1980 and who had not given birth before November 1980 are used. Results indicate that teen childbearing reduces the probability of completing high school by 8% to 10%. Some evidence suggests that programs that target reduction of teen childbearing in improving young women's education and subsequent economic and labor force outcomes.     

Nationality and Income Attainment among Native and Immigrant Hispanic Men in the United States*

This study examines earnings inequality between Hispanic-origin men and non-Hispanic white men (referred to as white) using the 1976 Survey of Income and Education. Results show that human capital and labor supply variables have more impact on Hispanic earnings than labor market characteristics. Post-school job experience and weeks worked conform most consistently to the predictions of micro-economic labor theory. Formal schooling, while positively related to earnings, does not uniformly influence job rewards among Hispanic-origin groups. Ecological variables (social and economic organization) of the labor market have less impact on earnings. There is some evidence that whites benefit from the presence of large concentrations of minority workers, while two Hispanic groups—native Mexican and other Spanish men—are negatively affected by high concentrations of Hispanic workers. A composition analysis shows that from 10 to 50 percent of the earnings gap between Hispanic and white men may be attributable to discrimination.     

中国城乡居民的中学教育分流与职业地位获得

布劳-邓肯的经典职业地位获得模型把教育水平作为阶层地位再生产的中间变量,却忽视了教育分流的效应。本研究认为,在当前中国社会中,中学教育分流对阶层地位的再生产的效应是不可忽视的。对2008年中国综合社会调查(CGSS2008)数据的分析显示,曾就读重点初中或高中的人更有可能获得较高水平的教育,从而在劳动力市场上获得较高的职业地位;但是教育分流的优势并未对人们现职职业地位产生显著的直接影响,只能通过教育获得和初职职业地位获得对现职职业地位获得产生间接影响。中国的重点、非重点中学校制,导致了后续高等教育机会分配的不平等,进而影响了人们职业地位的获得。这些研究结论以中国的资料拓展了布劳-邓肯模型关于教育作为阶层地位再生产的中间变量的内涵。     

Decreasing the Recent Immigrant Earnings Gap: The Impact of Canadian Credential Attainment

It is well documented that newly arrived immigrants face a significant earnings gap relative to native‐born workers. One way for new immigrants to improve their relative labour market position upon arrival in a host country is to improve their educational credentials. According to signalling theory, a host‐country credential should provide employers with a proxy for true productivity on the job, leading to higher earnings. Using data from a Canadian longitudinal survey, we employ longitudinal growth‐curve techniques to estimate the effect of receiving a Canadian educational credential on the income growth of racial‐minority recent immigrants compared to native‐born Canadians. The results indicate that the earnings gap between recent immigrants and native‐born Canadians is significantly reduced with the attainment of a Canadian educational credential.     

Power of Teen Motherhood in Predicting Later Educational Attainment

Abstract

This article investigates the power of teen motherhood in predicting later educational attainment. Data for mothers are extracted from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). Findings show that teen motherhood is inversely related to later educational attainment. Poverty, welfare receipt and the number of children have a direct influence on later educational attainment. Employment, the age of the woman at the time of her first marriage, and being married currently, had a direct positive influence on educational attainment. The implications for social work practice are discussed.