Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Educational inequality'

Social factors have long been included in theories that aim at explaining educational inequality, for example social integration or social influence from significant others. Using social network data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU), I am investigating to what extent social aspects can contribute to our understanding of ethnic and gendered patterns in educational inequality. The first two empirical chapters focus on explaining ethnic patterns in school grades and in the aspirations to attend university. In these, I find a positive relationship between low school grades and extent of social exclusion, measured through the absence of friendships and the existence of social rejection from classmates. This helps explaining ethnic grade disadvantages of recently arrived migrants, since they are more likely to be socially excluded. Further, I use friendship network data to detect social clusters within school classes, and find that changes in cluster members' aspirations are relatively more important for changes in individual aspirations than the corresponding changes of classmates outside of the social cluster. These chapters use an ego-centric network approach, i.e. they utilise social network data to capture characteristics of the social dimension around individuals and analyse them in regression models on the individual level. The latter two empirical chapters investigate how social influence can stabilise gendered patterns of favourite subjects and competence beliefs. Examining why girls get discouraged from subjects in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM), I find evidence for influence from friends on favourite subjects, as well as for the tendency of girls to be affected by the preferences of other girls in the classroom specifically when it comes to preferences for STEM subjects. Moreover, I show that there is a social influence from friends on maths competence beliefs, especially for boys, while girls tend to be more influenced by maths grades. These two chapters take a socio-centric approach, i.e. they deploy complete network analysis to detect patterns of social influence, while accounting for network structures and processes. This thesis shows that social aspects can contribute valuable insights into the study of educational choice and attainment. In identifying concrete social mechanisms surrounding and affecting individuals, this approach can thus help us understand how differences in educational outcomes come about.

By placing particular attention to the socio-economic dimension, this thesis explores the role of three pillars of an educational system: decentralization, early education and curricular tracking. The first article focuses on an experiment in Mexico that aimed to increase parental empowerment in the school's decision-making. Results show that increased participation produced an increase in cognitive abilities, however, this was mediated by the SES of the student. The second article brings an international perspective by comparing the evolution of the achievement gap over time in 32 countries. The findings suggest that tracking and vocational enrollment are important explanatory mechanisms of the cross-country variability in achievement gaps. The third article studies whether early education is associated with adult outcomes but concentrating on a particularly vulnerable population in the United States: GED recipients. Results show that participation in early education is associated with greater odds of graduating high school over attaining a GED.
Esta tesis explora el rol de tres pilares de un sistema educativo: descentralización, educación temprana y seguimiento curricular. El primer artículo estudia un experimento en México que tuvo como objetivo aumentar el empoderamiento de padres en la toma de decisiones en la escuela. Los resultados muestran que mayor participación de los padres aumentó las habilidades cognitivas de sus hijos. Sin embargo, esto fue mediado por el SES del estudiante. El segundo artículo compara la evolución de la brecha de logros en 32 países. Los hallazgos sugieren que el seguimiento curricular y los estudios vocacionales pueden ser mecanismos explicativos de la brecha. El tercer artículo estudia si la educación temprana está asociada con resultados positivos en la adultez en Estados Unidos. Los resultados muestran que la participación en educación temprana está asociado con mayores probabilidades de graduarse de la escuela secundaria en comparación con la obtención de un GED.

This thesis examines inequality of educational opportunities (IEO) in the transition to higher education. IEO measures the difference in higher education entry rates across social groups. The theoretical framework lays on Boudon's decomposition of IEO into primary and secondary effects of stratification. Furthermore, the theoretical propositions of Maximally Maintained Inequality (MMI) and Effectively Maintained Inequality (EMI) were also assessed to gain further understanding of IEO. The longitudinal data for the empirical analysis was created for a student cohort by linking administrative records of Chile's national student register, standardised tests and higher education enrolment. The student cohort was followed through the 12-years of compulsory education up to the transition to higher education, a year after completing secondary education. The results from the empirical analysis showed that secondary effects were consistently predominant over primary effects, driving the overall IEO. On the other hand, controlling for school characteristics increased the relative importance of secondary effects. However, primary effects explained a large extent of IEO in the transition to traditional (most prestigious) universities, by the same token, in the transition to undergraduate programmes. Differences in parental education levels between secondary education completion and higher education transitions proved to be consistent with MMI. Likewise, the higher likelihood of less advantaged students to enrol in vocational colleges or vocational programmes, and the higher likelihood of advantaged students to enrol in traditional universities or undergraduate programmes, evidenced support for EMI. The modelling setting was based on non-linear mediation modelling, accounting for sample-selection in the student cohort, two-level cross-classification between primary and secondary schools, and multinomial outcomes for type of institution and programme. This thesis contributes to the educational attainment literature by finding evidence that, in emerging economies like Chile, educational inequality persists despite the sustained expansion of the educational system.

This thesis comprises of two essays that explore issues related to human capital, technology and inequality. The first study examines the impact of human capital on recently created, direct measures of technology adoption. It indicates that the type of human capital that is formed via the learning-by-doing mechanism may be the most important determinant of technological diffusion, followed by qualitative determinants such as cognitive skills and quantitative or other measures. The second study examines qualitative measures of human capital from a microeconomic perspective by analyzing the composition and determinants of human capital inequality. Decomposition at school level reveals that each country has a unique set of determinants of within-school inequality. Compared to aggregated approaches used in extant literature, these findings suggest that a disaggregated, stepwise exploration of this type is more fruitful in identifying the root causes of inequality in human capital.

This thesis examines gender and educational inequality in South Korea. Its focus is to investigate the plausible mechanisms that account for the negative effects of education on married women's participation in the country's labour force by examining several aspects of gender inequalities. Korean women's education and labour market participation grew after the late industrialisation that occurred in the 1960s. Considering the historical exclusion of women in Korean society, this progress is noticeable. However, few Korean studies have examined patterns and trends of gender and educational inequalities systematically. This lack of attention propelled me to conduct a comprehensive study, especially a thorough analysis of the linkage among education, marriage and women's involvement in the country's labour markets. By using the most recent, nationally representative datasets, I found that the extent of gender'inequality in educational attainment remains substantial, even though the gender gap has generally decreased. The rate ofthe decrease was slowest for tertiary level of education, and women from farming class origins were likely to receive the lowest education. I also observed an unexpected pattern related to the benefit of education in occupational achievement: the impact of education on obtaining prestigious occupations was greater for women than for men. In relation to married women's labour market participation, my research revealed that the negative effect of education on women's labour market participation was affected by marital status and husbands' resources. Of interest, too, is the finding that highly educated women were less willing to accept paid jobs after they had married. This implies that strong educational homogamy in marriage and gender role attitudes may be important factors in deciding to stay at home. I believe that the results of my study, based as they are on current data, provide a comprehensive account of the patterns of gender. and educational inequality experienced by both genders in South Korea.

The first two pieces of work in this thesis look into the strategic decision of intergenerational educational investment and its implication to income inequality, skill distribution and income mobility. The contribution of my work is to incorporate matching frictions into the marriage market and analyze returns from strategic educational investments. The mechanism in the marriage market adopted follows the spirit of the competitive search model which interprets the ‘mismatch’ phenomenon as the result of coordination frictions in the matching process. The competitiveness and frictions in the family formation process create decreasing returns to high educational investment. The more parental households who choose high educational investment, the less is the return to high educational investment compared to the lower alternative. The fact that rich parental households suffer less from costly high educational investment puts the poor households at a disadvantage and the poor are more likely to be crowded out of the group that have incentives to choose high investment. The model predicts that given a certain parameter region, children of poor parents are more likely to become skilled if the fraction of rich parental households is not too large. In a multi-generational dynamic setting, it further implies the existence of a stationary household income distribution and income mobility rates. An increase in returns to education alone generates a larger stationary fraction of rich households and a larger upward income mobility rate. An increase in the cost of the high educational investment alone generates a smaller stationary fraction of rich households and a smaller upward income mobility rate. The third piece of work looks into the strategic interaction between passenger carriers over product quality and the location choice in a duopoly scheduled flight market. The model predicts that the two carriers prefer to be specialized in different flight quality (non-stop vs. one-stop) and adopt the same schedule when a higher quality difference makes the consumers less sensitive to the flight frequency. It contributes to literatures on the application of two-dimensional product differentiation in air-travel market analysis.

This study investigated educational stratification in Nigeria to determine how socioeconomic status, gender, and regional differences influence achievement in education using the nationally representative 2010 Nigeria Education Data Survey (NEDS). These cross-sectional data are among the first quality household survey data available for assessing aspects of education in Nigeria. In the last four decades, Nigeria has experienced dramatic expansion of its educational system. Following the introduction of educational policies and programs, growth in enrolment at the primary and secondary levels has largely been sustained. For instance, enrolment of pupils in primary education increased from 3,515,827 in 1970 to 14,383,487 in 1985 and to 20,080,986 in 2010. However, this impressive gain was followed by dwindling quality in the educational system, which has reported differing educational outcomes for different groups. Prior research in Nigeria has not examined how socioeconomic status influences achievement in education using large scale representative data. In this study, I primarily focused on assessing socioeconomic status to determine how it predicts achievement in reading and numeracy in Nigerian school children, ages 5 to 16 years. Nigeria is also known to have wide gender and regional gaps in education. Thus, I assessed gender and region variables to determine how much they contribute to the variance in educational achievement. I analyzed NEDS 2010 data and reported the findings of the descriptive and multivariate regression statistics. Descriptive statistics show the frequencies and distribution of the variables in the study. The multivariate regression analyses were employed to determine the relationship of socioeconomic status, gender, and region (the main predictor variables) with achievement in reading and numeracy (outcome variables). Given the use of survey data, both the descriptive and regression statistics were based on weighted statistics. This study found a significant wealth gap in reading and numeracy achievements among Nigerian children. I also found that family wealth, parental education, and region explain differences in academic achievement. Family wealth was found to be the most important variable influencing achievement in reading and numeracy, followed by mother's education and then region. Overall, the findings in this study suggest no significant differences in reading and numeracy achievement for boys and girls. Although gender was not found to be consistently associated with academic achievement in this study, it should not be assumed to mean that gender equality in education exists in Nigeria. It is widely reported elsewhere that gender-biased educational opportunity plays a major role in influencing educational attainment and achievement. More research, preferably using a longitudinal study design, is needed to identify the trends and patterns of gender roles in Nigerian educational attainment and achievement. The findings in this study provide the foundation for making further investigations on the association of social, economic, and cultural factors with academic achievement and to assess inequality in education in Nigeria.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Sociology, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4635. Adviser: Maurice Garnier.

This thesis examines social-class inequalities in educational attainment. The central aims of the thesis are to assess the applicability of Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction theory and Goldthorpe’s rational choice theory. Drawing on the Millennium Cohort Study and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, the thesis conducts rigorous analyses on class differences in educational attainment (termed ‘primary effects’) and in educational decision making, controlling for previous attainment (termed ‘secondary effects’). The analyses find support for Bourdieu’s notion that cultural competence and particular class-characterised dispositions can generate educational advantage. For young children, however, these are not found to mediate the link between class and cognitive performance substantially, and are unable to account for the growing divergences that occur in the first few years of compulsory schooling. For older children, these are shown to be the main mechanism through which those from advantaged homes realise educational success. The thesis also examines trends in continuation in post-compulsory academic study and evaluates the usefulness of rational action theory for understanding the secondary effects of social class. Choice-based differences are shown to be of little importance for understanding the further disadvantage some pupils face once attainment has been controlled for. However, this finding is subject to the important caveat that the secondary effects of social class differ for white and non-white pupils. The thesis considers the implications of this finding for the Breen–Goldthorpe (1997) model of educational decision making and suggests the important assumption of relative risk aversion may not be appropriate for non-white groups. A range of statistical methods are used in this thesis, including some advanced techniques such as multilevel growth curve modelling. The thesis also makes a series of methodological recommendations for future studies. Finally, the analyses in this thesis show the overriding importance of parents’ education for children’s cognitive and educational attainment. This is demonstrably the most influential way in which social origin perpetuates differences between the advantaged and disadvantaged, at all stages of pupils’ educational careers. This thesis contributes to existing knowledge in this field in the theoretical, substantive and methodological domains.

In spite of educational expansion, a considerable number of individuals are not able to participate in upper secondary and higher education in Mexico. The main purpose of this thesis is to examine the factors influencing individuals’ opportunities to make higher educational transitions in Mexico. These transitions are: participation in upper secondary education, completion of upper secondary education and progression to higher education. A parallel objective is to investigate the predictors of persons’ institutional location in the upper secondary level. It is argued that the majority of the international studies in the field of educational transitions, as well as most of the studies conducted for Mexico in this area, have focused on examining the chances of entering an educational level but less attention has been paid on examining the opportunities of concluding a given level of education. This dissertation explores the chances of completing upper secondary education and it incorporates school dropouts in the analysis of educational transitions. Another important purpose is to conduct interdisciplinary theoretical work. A theoretical framework composed of the capability approach, sociocultural reproduction theory and contemporary sociological perspectives on inequalities in education is used to operationalize key concepts and to provide possible explanations of persons’ decisions to participate in upper secondary and higher education. From the capability approach, human agency, preferences and rationality have influence on educational decision-making. From Bourdieu’s sociocultural reproduction theory, educational choices are not freely made because they are determined by cultural and socioeconomic constraints. Furthermore, drawing on the integrative theoretical framework several hypotheses are formulated and some of them are empirically tested using national survey data for Mexico: The School Dropouts Survey, 2011. The investigation adopts a quantitative methodology which includes the estimation of binomial and multinomial logistic regression models. This study found that the effects of ascriptive factors such as social and ethnic background, gender and geographical location vary for each school transition. In addition, some of these factors contribute to predict person’s location in academic and vocational pathways of upper secondary education. Nevertheless, individuals’ capacity to attain higher levels of schooling is not completely determined by structural-related aspects. This thesis found that agency and capability dimensions such as freedom to choose school, aspirations and persons’ preferences towards education are not only intrinsically valuable but instrumentally relevant for making higher educational transitions. Furthermore, the type of institution attended and academic performance matter for entering and completing upper secondary and for attending higher education. This thesis concludes that the degree to which structural factors, agency and capability dimensions and school experiences make an impact on individuals’ educational trajectories is significantly affected by specific institutional arrangements at each stage of education. Finally, the empirical evidence of this thesis has a number of important implications for educational policies in Mexico.

La desigualtat educativa entre la població rural i urbana a la Xina no es deu només a la urbanització i desenvolupament econòmic. Les polítiques de separació i desigual distribució dels recursos educatius tenen un efecte molt important. Segons la teoria d’estructuració de Giddens’ (1984) el sistema educatiu com a part del sistema social té una dimensió temporal i en l’espai que escapa el control de qualsevol actor individual. Al mateix temps les teories sobre el sistema educatiu dels actors guien les seves accions i al seu torn afecten el sistema educatiu. Fins ara la recerca en sociologia ha fet servir la teoria de l’assoliment de l’estatus per explicar la desigualtat educacional. Això ignora els canvis socials a nivell macro i la distribució de recursos educatius (M.Horan, 2013). Per altra banda els estudis econòmics sobre la persistència de la desigualtat emfatitzen la importància de les condicions econòmiques familiars (Mookherjee i Ray, 2003). Basant-se en aquesta explicació econòmica que se centra en la persistència de la desigualtat les organitzacions internacionals i domèstiques intervenen sobre la demanda. L’objectiu és canviar les condicions econòmiques de les famílies amb ingressos baixos per estimular la seva preferència per l’educació. Però aquestes polítiques han sigut molt menys efectives del que s’esperava (Bonal, 2007). Per tant caldria afegir factors com ara l’estructura social, polítiques, cultura i característiques institucionals en els models teòrics. Històricament la població xinesa es va dividir entre residents rurals i urbans a través del sistema de registre de llars (sistema hukou) pel qual cada individu es registrava com a rural o urbà segons el lloc de naixement. El sistema hukou encara té una gran influència sobre l’estructura social i cultural. En aquesta tesi utilitzo el marc teòric estructuralista per analitzar la bretxa educativa entre la població urbana i rural a la Xina. La tesi té un doble objectiu: primer, aplicar empíricament la teoria de l’estructuració a l’anàlisi de la desigualtat educativa utilitzant mètodes quantitatius; segon, entendre les causes de la bretxa educativa entre la població urbana i rural a la Xina. Així doncs, la tesi conté una discussió teòrica sobre com aplicar la teoria de l’estructuració per estudiar la desigualtat educativa a més de tres estudis empírics. El capítol 2 utilitza el marc estructuralista per elaborar una relació recursiva entre estructura social i els resultats educatius de diferents agents. El capítol 3 conté la revisió de la literatura i el Capítol 4 introdueix breument les dades i mètode d’anàlisi dels tres capítols empírics. El Capítol 5 es el primer capítol empíric. Estudia com els canvis en el sistema econòmic i educatiu afecten la bretxa educativa entre la població rural i urbana a la Xina; el Capítol 6 analitza l’efecte de la distribució de l’oferta de recursos educatius en la bretxa educativa entre la població rural i urbana xineses. El capítol 7 estudia l’efecte de la demanda de recursos educatius sobre la bretxa educativa. Els resultats empírics suggereixen que la bretxa cultural entre la població urbana i rural a la Xina ha augmentat els darrers anys, però que la raó d’aquest augment en la desigualtat no són les diferències entre la posició social dels individus sinó de la desigualtat de l’oferta de recursos educatius i diferències en entorns educatius. L’últim capítol (capítol 8) dóna una visió general dels resultats més importants i suggereix que les polítiques igualitàries del període socialista encara influencien les expectatives educatives de la població rural, però que la distribució de recursos cada cop més desigual, i les barreres socials per la població rural, augmenten la desigualtat educacional entre la població rural i urbana a la Xina.
La desigualdad educativa entre la población rural y urbana en China no se debe solamente a la urbanización y el desarrollo económico. Las políticas de separación y la desigual distribución de los recursos educativos tienen un efecto muy importante. Según la teoría de estructuración de Giddens (1984) el sistema educativo como parte del sistema social tiene una dimensión temporal y espacial que escapa el control de cualquier actor individual. Al mismo tiempo las teorías sobre el sistema educativo de los actores guían sus acciones, y estas a su vez afectan el sistema educativo. Hasta ahora la investigación en sociología ha utilizado la teoría de los logros de estatus para explicar la desigualdad educacional. Esta teoría ignora los cambios sociales a nivel macro y la distribución de recursos educativos (M. Horan, 2013). Por otro lado los estudios económicos sobre la persistencia de la desigualdad enfatizan la importancia de las condiciones económicas familiares (Mookherjee i Ray, 2003). Las organizaciones internacionales y domèsticas intervienen sobre la demanda con el objetivo de cambiar las condiciones económicas de las familias de bajos ingresos para estimular la su preferencia por la educación. Pero estas políticas han sido mucho menos efectivas de lo que se esperaba (Bonal, 2007). Por lo tanto hace falta añadir factores tales como la estructura social, las políticas, cultura y características institucionales en los modelos teóricos. Históricamente la población china se dividió entre residentes rurales y urbanos por el sistema de registro de hogares (sistema hukou). El sistema hukou todavía tiene una gran influencia sobre la estructura social y cultural. En esta tesis utilizo el marco teórico estructuralista para analizar la brecha educativa entre la población urbana y rural en China. La tesis tiene un doble objetivo: primero, aplicar empíricamente la teoría de la estructuración al análisis de la desigualdad educativa utilizando métodos cuantitativos; segundo, entender las causas de la brecha educativa entre la población urbana y rural en China. La tesis contiene una discusión teórica sobre como aplicar la teoría de la estructuración para estudiar la desigualdad educativa además de tres estudios empíricos. El capítulo 2 utiliza el marco estructuralista para elaborar una relación recursiva entre estructura social y los resultados educativos de diferentes agentes. El capítulo 3 contiene la revisión de la literatura y el Capítulo 4 introduce brevemente los datos y método de análisis de los tres capítulos empíricos. El Capítulo 5 es el primer capítulo empírico. Estudia como los cambios en el sistema económico y educativo afectan la brecha educativa entre la población rural y urbana en China; el Capítulo 6 analiza el efecto de la distribución de la oferta de recursos educativos en la brecha educativa entre la población rural y urbana en China; El capítulo 7 estudia el efecto de la demanda de recursos educativos sobre la brecha educativa. Los resultados empíricos sugieren que la brecha cultural entre la población urbana y rural en China ha aumentado en los últimos años, pero que la razón de este aumento en la desigualdad no son las diferencias entre la posición social de los individuos sino de la desigualdad de la oferta de recursos educativos y diferencias en el entorno educativo. El último capítulo (capítulo 8) da una visión general de los resultados más importantes y sugiere que las políticas igualitarias del período socialista aún influencian las expectativas educativas de la población rural. Sin embargo, la distribución de recursos cada vez más desigual, y las barreras sociales para la población rural causan un aumento de la desigualdad educacional entre la población rural y urbana en China.
Educational inequality between rural and urban Chinese people is not only the result of urbanisation and economic development but also constructed by separation policies and unequal distribution of educational resources. According to Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory, the education system as a part of social system stretches away in time and space, beyond the control of any individual actors. At the same time, the actors’ own theories of the education system guide their activities which may reify the education system. However, most previous sociological research only uses status attainment theory to explain educational inequality, ignoring the effects of macro-level social changes and distribution of educational resources (M.Horan, 2013). On the other hand, economic studies on persistent inequality emphasise the importance of a family’s economic condition, leading to different preferences on their educational consumption (Mookherjee and Ray, 2003). Based on the economic explanation of persistent inequality, international and domestic organisations implement demand-side interventions, these aim to stimulate their educational demands by improving the economic condition of low-income families. However, those policies are far less effective than it had been expected (Bonal, 2007). Thus, it is necessary to add factors such as principles of social structure, policies, culture and institutional characteristics into theoretical models. Historically, the Chinese population was divided into rural and urban residents via the household registration system (the hukou system) whereby people were either registered as rural or urban residents according to their place of birth. The hukou system still has a great influence on shaping the present social structure and culture. This dissertation uses a structuralist framework to analyse the educational gap between rural and urban Chinese people. The objective of the dissertation is twofold: first, to empirically apply the structuration theory on analysis the educational inequality with quantitative method; second, to understand the causes of the educational gap between rural and urban Chinese people. In pursuing this objective, a theoretical discussion of the application of structuration theory to the study educational inequality and three empirical studies were conducted that together form the present dissertation. Chapter 2 uses a structuralist framework to elaborate the recursive relationship between social structure and agents’ educational outcomes. It argues that the agents’ motivation in pursuing higher education is shaped by both historical experiences and current social structure. Chapter 3 reviews the relevant literature and Chapter 4 briefly introduces the data and methods of analysis used in the three empirical chapters. Chapter 5 is the first empirical chapter, in which I analyse how changes to the economic and political systems affect the educational gap between rural and urban Chinese people; Chapter 6 analyses the effect of the supply-side distribution of educational resources on the educational gap between rural and urban Chinese students; Chapter 7 investigates the effect of demand-side educational resources on the educational gap. The findings in these three empirical chapters suggest that the educational gap between rural and urban Chinese people has been widening in recent years, and the driving force behind the widening educational gap is the unequal distribution of supply-side educational resources and differences in educational environments. The last chapter (Chapter 8) provides an overview of the main findings, and suggest they imply that the egalitarian policies from the socialist period may still affect rural Chinese people’s educational expectations. However, the increasingly unequal distribution of resources and social barriers for rural Chinese people is deepening educational inequality between rural and urban Chinese people. This kind of inequality will be difficult to reduce as long as the nation’s development model continues to be urban-centred and in the absence of redistributive policies.
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Programa de Doctorat en Sociologia

Bildung ist ein Instrument, das zur Bekämpfung von Armut, Ungleichheit und sozialer Ausgrenzung in jeder Gesellschaft eingesetzt werden kann. Für eine nachhaltige und ganzheitliche nationale Entwicklung ist daher eine gerechte Verteilung der Bildungsressourcen unter den Menschen erforderlich. Dies ist jedoch nicht immer ohne Weiteres zu erreichen, insbesondere in Afrika, wo der Kolonialismus in vielen Ländern teilweise zu einer ungleichen Entwicklung unter den Menschen geführt hat. Schon bald nach der Eingliederung der Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (heute Ghana) in die Kolonialherrschaft vernachlässigte die Bildungspolitik der Kolonialisten den nördlichen Teil des Landes. Obwohl es einige Studien zum Kolonialismus in Afrika im Allgemeinen gibt, wurde nur wenig darüber berichtet, welche Rolle er bei der Schaffung eines ungleichen Bildungswesens spielte. Auch die Auswirkungen von aktiven Förderungsmaßnahmen, die zur Überbrückung der Kluft zwischen dem Nord-Süd-Gefälle in Ghana eingeführt wurden. Die wichtigsten Fragen, die diese Studie daher zu beantworten versucht, sind die Folgenden: Was waren die kolonialen Begegnungen mit dem Norden Ghanas, die die Unterentwicklung des Bildungswesens in der Region bewirkten? Wie überbrücken die aktiven Förderungsmaßnahmen bzw. die positive Diskriminierung die Kluft zwischen dem Norden und dem Süden des Landes? Zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfragen wurde in der Studie ein methodengemischter Ansatz verwendet, bei dem Tiefeninterviews, Q-Methoden, Dokumentenanalyse und Beobachtung als Datenerhebungsmethoden Einsatz fanden. Es stellte sich heraus, dass die Kolonialisten eine bewusste Strategie verfolgten, den Norden zu einer Reserve ungelernter Arbeitskräfte zu machen, was erklärt, warum sie dort anfangs nur wenige Schulen bauten. Die Ergebnisse der Studie zeigen darüber hinaus, dass die positive Diskriminierung die Nord-Süd-Lücke nicht wie erwartet schließt. So kommt man zu dem Schluss, dass die Ausbeutung weitesgehend für die Unterentwicklung des Bildungswesens in Nordghana verantwortlich ist.
Education is a tool that can be used to fight poverty, inequality, and social exclusion in every given society. Thus, for a sustainable and holistic national development, there is the need for an equitable distribution of educational resources among the people. This is however hardly achievable, especially in Africa where colonialism has partly brought about unequal development among the people in many countries. Soon after the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) was incorporated under colonial rule, the educational policy of the colonialists did not favour the northern part of the country. Even though, there have been some studies on the colonialism of Africa in general, little has been done regarding the role it played in (re)producing unequal development of education in Africa. Likewise, the impact of an affirmative action instituted to bridge the gap between the north-south divide in Ghana has not been evaluated. The main questions this study thus seek to answer are: What were the colonial encounters with the north that brought about the underdevelopment of education in the area? How is the affirmative action bridging the gap between the north and the south? To answer the research questions, the study used a mixed-methods approach where in-depth interviews, Q methods, document analysis and observation were adapted as data collection methods. It was revealed that the colonialists adopted a deliberate strategy of making the north an unskilled labour reserve, thus accounting for why they did not build many schools there in the beginning. The findings of the study also show that the effect of the affirmative action has not been able to appreciably contribute to closing the north-south gap as expected. It is concluded that exploitation largely accounted for the underdevelopment of education in northern Ghana.

Brazil faces low levels of educational achievement at the tertiary level. Historically, higher education institutions in Brazil are predominately attended by wealthier individuals. Two educational initiatives, Prouni, a scholarship program for private tertiary institutions, and Lei de Cotas 2012, an affirmative action law for public institutions, have been implemented to assist students coming from low income backgrounds. The majority of individuals in low income brackets in Brazil tend to be people of color, so inadvertently these policies may have an effect on racial minorities. This study explores the effect of the aforementioned policies on racial minority groups in higher education by reviewing previous studies and analyzing racial demographic data of higher education institutions, and concludes that the Lei de Cotas is most effective for students from racial minority backgrounds.

Social mobility has been extensively documented based on two-generational associations. Whereas a few studies suggest that the approach related to social inequalities should be open to multigenerational associations, the topic of social mobility over multiple generations is still at its blooming stage. Very little is known about multigenerational effects on education in Britain and about empirical evidence of the mechanisms that underlie multigenerational effects. Drawing on the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Longitudinal Household Study, this thesis examines social mobility over three generations in Britain. The central aims of the thesis are to explore direct grandparental effects on grandchildren's educational and class attainments independent of parental influences. In particular, it focuses on mechanisms through which grandparental effects operate. The thesis finds that grandparental class is significantly associated with grandchildren's educational achievement, despite parental class, parental education, and parental wealth being taken into account. Regarding the mechanisms, the evidence suggests first that the impacts of grandparental class on education remain even though grandparents have passed away at the time of the survey, and second that the impacts disappear only when grandparents have only infrequent contact with the family. Furthermore, I find that grandparental effects are significantly stronger on grandchildren originating from advantaged parents than on those from disadvantaged parents, indicating the strong persistence of inequalities at the top of social stratification. The research also highlights significant, albeit modest, effects of grandparental class on grandchildren's class attainment over and above parental influences. For grandsons, maternal grandparental class still matters even after grandsons' education has been controlled for. In particular, self-employed grandparents have a strong impact on grandsons' likelihood of engagement in self-employment, a pattern that holds true even when parents are not self-employed. For granddaughters, neither paternal nor maternal grandparental class is found to have a direct substantial impact on granddaughters' class after granddaughters' education has been controlled for. The thesis suggests that the conventional social mobility approach based on parentchild associations may overestimate the effects of parental characteristics and underestimate the effects of family origins. Family advantages run deep; they are maintained over generations in Britain.

This paper assesses the role of literacy skills as an equalizer in both educational outcomes and educational opportunities. First, by linking two surveys of adult skills for 11 OECD countries (PIAAC - Survey of Adult Skills (conducted in mid-1990s) and IALS - International Adult Literacy Survey (conducted in 2011)), the relationship between performance (average literacy test scores) across countries and within-country skill inequality (dispersion in literacy test scores) is examined. Although Okun's style tradeoff could suggest that there is a tradeoff between efficiency and equality, in this analysis the opposite holds true. Countries with higher average literacy test scores have, at the same time, higher equality in literacy test scores. Second, the role of intergenerational educational mobility (one aspect of equality of opportunity) across countries on both average literacy scores and equality in literacy scores is estimated. There is a significant effect of parental educational levels on children's test scores in all countries, but there is a substantial cross-country variation in the size of the coefficients, which suggests that families play different roles in the transmission of educational skills across countries. Furthermore, this paper finds that an increase in average literacy scores (particularly, improvement in the literacy skills of the low-skilled adults) is positively associated with higher intergenerational educational mobility and higher equality of literacy test scores. Third, by decomposing differences in average literacy scores between the surveys, this paper finds that although increasing educational attainment was the primary driver behind the rise in average literacy scores, literacy scores for each educational age group declined in all countries, which may imply a decrease in educational efficiency. From a policy perspective, increases in access to education and rises in educational attainment alone (although extremely beneficial) are not enough. A focus on educational reform and better quality of education are required in order to improve educational efficiency. Additionally, family policies and an active welfare state may be necessary in order to tackle inequalities.
Series: INEQ Working Paper Series

The focus of this dissertation was to explore the importance of high quality early education in later secondary education development, quantifying quality in early childhood education programs, and examining how teacher education contributes to quality of early childhood education programs. For phase I, early childhood education positively associated with improved eighth grade state proficiency percentages in the mathematics and writing summative assessment scores. When examining scoring procedures for Colorado Shines QRIS in phase II, programs that accepted Colorado Child Care Assistance Program (CCCAP), were not part of Colorado Preschool Program (CPP), had children that spoke more than one language, and accepted infants overall scored the lowest scores of early education programs. Phase III results showed that teachers with bachelor’s degrees did not significantly improve overall student mathematics and literacy scores under TS Gold compared to students of teachers that did not have bachelor’s degrees.

Educational assortative mating and earnings inequality has both increased in both Europe and the United States in the last decades. As a result, educational assortative mating, or educational homogamy, has been suggested as a potential explanation for the increase in earnings inequality. According to this hypothesis increased sorting on education will lead to polarization between lower and higher-educated couples where the advantages of the latter will compound on one another and lead to increased economic inequality.   The majority of the studies to date report a non-relationship between educational assortative mating and earnings inequality, one of the exceptions being a study of Denmark. This exception has led sociologists to theorize that the impact of educational assortative mating could be especially strong in the Nordic countries. In this study I test this hypothesis by employing a novel decomposition method, the Theil-index, to answer if increases in educational assortative mating are associated with increases in earnings inequality in Sweden between 2000 and 2010, using data from the Standard of Living Survey (LNU).   The result is a non-relationship between homogamy and earnings inequality and an overall decrease in earnings inequality in the sample. The result is another null result for the hypothesis that educational homogamy leads to inequality, and points to a larger discrepancy between singles and couples than between couples. If corroborated, this decrease in earnings inequality would mean a divergence, in earnings inequality, between partnered individuals and the general population. Future studies should focus on the extent of this divergence.

Cette thèse examine, au niveau lycée, la contribution de l’origine ethnique aux expériences scolaires d’élèves désavantagés (N=927). Elle a pour objectif d’étudier les rapports entre inégalité sociale, expérience scolaire, et structure institutionnelle. Afin d’enquêter sur le rôle de l’identification ethnique et sa relation aux facteurs institutionnels, une analyse comparative a été menée dans deux pays. L’étude du cas des élèves d’origine turque en France et en Australie indique que les influences de l’ethnicité sont transformées d’un contexte à l’autre par des structures pédagogiques distinctives. En France, les filières et les jugements académiques sévères en réduisent l’estime de soi, en créant de l’aliénation et de la distance sociale entre élève et professeur. En Australie, au contraire, le différemment de la sélection et du jugement permet, de façon temporaire, une atmosphère plus conviviale en cours, mais ne réussit pas à assurer le succès académique des élèves. Les efforts des deux systèmes dans les sites périphériques constituent des logiques d’intégration marginales qui permettent l’exclusion de l’intérieure. Les efforts des élèves pour donner un sens à la vie scolaire à travers des cultures de pairs qui se ressemblent dans les deux contextes font partie des stratégies d’intégration marginale. Les élèves d’origine immigrée semblent particulièrement concernés par ces logiques et stratégies, qui renforcent leur position subordonnée dans le système. L’étude identifie alors les difficultés auxquelles sont confrontés les deux systèmes comme résultant de caractéristiques structurelles
This thesis examines the contribution of ‘ethnic’ background to the school experiences of educationally and socially disadvantaged students in the senior years of high school (n=927). To investigate the role both of ethnic identification and its interplay with institutional factors, a comparative analysis of secondary student experiences in two national settings was undertaken. The case of Turkish-background students in Australia and France suggests that the influences of ethnic identity are thoroughly transformed from one setting to the other by distinctive pedagogical structures. Streaming and severe academic judgement in France lower academic self-esteem, while creating resentment and social distance between students and teachers. By contrast, the deferral of selection and judgement in Australia allows, temporarily, for a more convivial classroom atmosphere, but fails just as surely to successfully navigate students through the curriculum and achieve academic success. The accommodations of both systems to students in ‘peripheral’ locations constitute logics of marginal integration which enable and legitimise ‘exclusion from within’. Student efforts to make meaning of school life through peer cultures which share many similarities across institutional and national boundaries emerge as what I have called strategies of marginal integration. Ethnic-minority students appear to be particularly susceptible to those logics and strategies, which reinforce their position within the system as marginal. This study therefore identifies the difficulties facing both systems as emerging from common overarching structural qualities

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and income inequality. Previous research suggests that this relationship is expected to be positive, i.e. high income inequality is associated with low intergenerational educational mobility. To estimate the association between the two specified variables data on educational mobility is taken from a previous study and data on the income inequality measure, the Gini coefficient is taken from the World Bank. A weighted least square regression shows that 0.10 increase in the Gini coefficient leads to a 0.135 increase in the measure of educational mobility. Moreover, one underlying mechanism for this certain linkage is inspected. Pearson correlation between public spending on education as a percent of GDP and educational mobility show a rather strong negative association suggesting that higher spending on education is related to higher educational mobility.

Workers whose credentials and skills do not meet or exceed the required competencies for their jobs have been of interest to scholars investigating the transition from school to jobs. To understand how such mismatch arises in the transitional period, some scholars emphasize that the labor market cannot keep up with the pace of educational expansion. Thus, many highly educated workers do not find jobs that fit their schooling and skill level. Others locate the source of mismatch in the inability of education to produce enough workers with the desired skill levels in the labor market. By focusing on this mismatch, this dissertation aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between education and work. In particular, this study examines data covering the past two decades to see how the number of workers with skill and educational mismatch has changed and how educational expansion and transformations in the labor market have contributed to the change. The results indicate that workers with such mismatch have generally increased over the past two decades, but educational expansion has minimally contributed to this change. Rather, it is more likely caused by business cycles or job characteristics. The study also explores how the practices applied to select suitable workers in the hiring process affects workers’ job matching. This study suggests that workers are classified into various types depending on strategies by which employers use to determine workers’ degree of fit. Subsequently, their earnings and job satisfaction vary according to workers’ membership in these types of groups.

Several researchers have found a link between inequality across groups within a country and armed conflict. However, this research has focused almost exclusively on inequalities in income and political access, forsaking other key societal dimensions such as education. In this article, I examine the link between educational inequality across groups within a country and armed conflict. I use data from the Worldwide Inequality Database on Education to create measures of educational inequality by gender, wealth, and country region for developing countries across the world. I combine these measures with data on income and political inequality in order to better establish the unique association between educational inequality and armed conflict. Overall, I find a positive association between educational inequality and the likelihood that a group within a given country and year will be involved in armed conflict. This association is particularly strong across gender groups and country regions. These findings have implications for conflict prediction, preventative diplomacy efforts, and domestic and international organizations focused on educational and human development.

This design-based research provides design considerations for developing educational tools for teaching programming to blind primary schoolers, as an effort towards more inclusive classrooms, given that the tools available today are not accessible to these students. Existing tools were analyzed and tested, and co-design practices were applied in exploring ‘instructions’ as a main logic operation for computer programming, through experimenting with diverse types of interfaces, having visually impaired participants at the center of the process. Physical and mental patterns, relevant for improving the accessibility of such tools, are unveiled and further discussed in this study.

The aim of my research was examine the impact of race, class and gender in Ottawa's educational system. I sought to find out if these factors played a role in the streaming of Black youths in basic or vocational programs and, if so, to what degree. While looking at the issue, I examined the narratives of both middle-class and working-class students and parents.
The study found that a student's socio-economic background largely determine her/his educational stream, be it basic, general or advanced. For example, all the participants in the vocational stream were working-class students while the participants that were streamed into the university bound program were from middle-class families. Teachers within the system also treated the parents differently. Middle-class parents had a greater degree of reciprocity between themselves and teachers compared to working-class parents.

My dissertation formally develops a theory of education-based inequality and mobility to integrate the existing theoretical accounts and results in the fields. The empirical puzzle I examine is why the triangle associations among social origin, educational attainment and social destination present various patterns in different societies under educational expansion. By using a variety of cross-sectional survey data from reforming China, I illustrate that class mobility strategies, structural and institutional features in the educational system and the sociopolitical institutional context are the most important dimensions to understand how educational expansion affects education-based social stratification and inequality. My analyses demonstrate that, with China’s “bottleneck” educational opportunity structure and rising educational cost under educational expansion, we observe increasing educational inequality, declining social mobility and increasing social origin differentials in the college premium in the last three decades.
Sociology

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003.
Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 107 p.; also includes graphics (some col.). Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Douglas B. Downey, Dept. of Chemistry. Includes bibliographical references (p. 92-98).

From 1868-1917 the St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) underwent a formative period. SLPS was shaped primarily by professional administrators working in a transnational education community and responses to their philosophies and policies by both white and African American women teachers, members of the African American community, and students themselves. While SLPS strove to include increasing numbers of students in their schools, their practices ultimately kept groups of students separated from one another and reinforced the racial, economic, gender, and ability-based divisions in society. The philosophies and practices developed by SLPS during this period influenced education world-wide, including the use of industrial education in colonial situations.

In the last decades, the Chilean educational system is carrying on a process of increasing reforms, beginning with the instauration of a voucher system. Since the implementation of this scheme, however, researchers have pointed out the low academic efficacy and remarkable problem of equity that have developed from this intended reform. After the resulting social discontent, education became an undeniable priority in the national debate; consequently, a significant adjustment to the system was enacted in 2008. Existing scholarly work points to the need for expanding the study of school effectiveness to include a wider notion of context. Theoretically, part of the existing research isolates school performance from its wider sociocultural context, which can be defined as the policy environment and socioeconomic composition of the school. Both of these definitions of context have been avoided or reduced. Although the current effectiveness research emphasises school processes as a way to centralise the idea that school can make a difference, it nevertheless remains acritical with regard to specific policy ideological assumptions and their implications on the notion of effectiveness and the real power of the school to take part in social change. The purpose of this research is to broaden the study of school effectiveness within a long-lasting market oriented system. Using a mixed method research design, the data is collected and analysed through quantitative and qualitative approaches. Deploying multilevel analysis (HLM), the study analyses the presence and impact of the socioeconomic composition of school related to the effectiveness and equity of mathematics academic distribution in 4th grade students at a national level. Aiming to decode the impact of recent policy accountability, the qualitative approach interviews principals and teachers, thereby examining practices for effectiveness and the impact of accountability on the teachers' sense of professionalisation. Nvivo software is used to initiate a grounded theory explanation of the sensemaking of principals and teachers in three socioeconomic disadvantaged school cases. The study concludes that the level of socioeconomic composition of a school impacts more strongly than the family socioeconomic composition, constituting a double disadvantage for vulnerable students. Disadvantaged students attending disadvantaged schools are doubly affected by socioeconomic segregation. These contextual variables affect the effectiveness of schools, resulting in school comparisons that are unfair and misleading. Public schools appear to perform better than private schools when contextual variables are taken into account; however, the existing public policy of school classification does not include multilevel analysis or the type of contextual variables incorporated in this research. Another important conclusion of this study is that the policy of accountability erodes teacher professionalisation and encourages an authoritarian type of leadership. The practice of emphasising specific subjects and the idea of equating student learning with results on standardised evaluations affect the pedagogical practices of teachers, limiting their process to undertaking a series of routine actions for test preparation. Moreover, the urgency toward achieving good test results encourage schools to focus their practices on accomplishing these results, and not on the process of learning. A successful approach to effectiveness within the accountability system seems to be related to highly organised schools with a top-down type of leadership. Disadvantaged schools with a high sense of teacher professionalism and with democratic and flexible school organisation appear to be in opposition to the accountability policy. These findings have significant implications for the operation of a market oriented system. The market oriented system operating in Chile affects the distribution of student opportunities based on their socioeconomic background. The existing school segregation impacts both the operations inside the school and the purpose of the system that is intended to equalise and develop opportunities for students, thereby making school a social institution that can have a positive effect on the lives of pupils and staff. Persisting in a view of the market as a social regulator of effectiveness is not supported by empirical evidence; instead, this view shifts responsibility to the schools and encourages them to compete with each other as a logic of productivity, which affects how schools respond to students who are most in need of their care. Reducing the objectives of education to performativity leads to an impoverishing of the educational experience of students, and a diminishing sense of professionalism of staff. The notion of educational quality requires broadening to include a democratic experience of knowledge construction.

This thesis provides a long-term cross-national comparison of changes in educational at-tainment and a detailed longitudinal analysis of the changes in inequality of educational opportunity in East and West Germany. Using data from the 2011 PIAAC study, the the-sis examines how a different focus on equality (equality of condition and equality of op-portunity) in different welfare regimes reveals cross-national variations in educational expansion, the association between educational background and educational attainment and the change in this association over time. Based on longitudinal data from the NEPS, the thesis then focuses on how far educational reforms have changed the character of the old clear-cut divisions between academic and vocational tracks in lower and upper sec-ondary school as well as in the landscape of higher education in East and West Germany. The empirical findings indicate that educational expansion and educational inequality vary significantly across welfare regimes and over time. In Germany, I find strong and persistent associations between family resources and the probability of making the transi-tion from primary school to the academic track. Educational reforms in lower secondary school did not provide more openness between the non-academic and academic tracks in Germany. However, reforms in the vocational education and training system have in-creased the permeability between tracks tremendously, so that the vocational and academ-ic tracks are much more integrated today. More permeability is, however, not connected with more educational equalities. Overall, educational inequality in the attainment of a tertiary degree has remained surprisingly stable across birth cohorts.

Inequality of educational opportunity is a crucial topic in education policy, and a matter of strong debate in the Chilean context. In this thesis, I aim to identify and analyse likely drivers of educational inequality in Chile, by looking at three relevant dimensions: Teacher effectiveness, Secondary School Quality and School Systems’ Institutional Characteristics. First, in Chapter 2, I analyse how differentials on teacher effectiveness across Chilean schools from different socioeconomic status explain differentials in learning achievement in secondary education. Second, in Chapter 3, I assess how school level characteristics and other institutional features of the Chilean school system could be explaining students’ access to higher education. Third, in Chapter 4, and through an international comparison using PISA data, I study the effect of school accountability practices on educational outcomes, gathering lessons for the Chilean case.

Internal and external migrations are a phenomenon of growing magnitude within the European continent. Most importantly, the last decades have once and for all destroyed the illusion of the transience of immigration settlement, raising concerns on the lack of integration of long term immigrants in host societies. In particular, migrant educational disadvantage is a serious issue in most European countries, as shown by international assessments on students’ competencies. In the last years, public debates have called attention to the need of identifying institutional features able to endow children of migrants with equal chances to succeed in school compared to their native peers. However, empirical evidence on the role of educational systems in worsening or mitigating migrant learning disadvantage is still inconclusive. In this dissertation, I conduct a systematic investigation of whether and why second-generation immigrants experience different achievement penalties in 17 Western European countries. The research design is based on a two-step, mixed methods approach. In the first step I provide a comparative assessment of migrant-specific penalties in educational achievement. The cross-country variability of migrant achievement penalties becomes the explanandum in the second step of analysis, when I assess the role of theoretically relevant characteristics of educational systems as potential explanantes. At each step of the analysis, I rely on methodological triangulation — by using variable-oriented and diversity-oriented methods — in order to improve the overall robustness of the empirical findings. By using the 2006 and 2009 waves of the PISA survey, I analyze the relative disadvantage of 15-year-old students of immigrant vs. native origin in the literacy domains of mathematics, science, and reading. With a novel measure of migrant-specific penalty — revealing the relative of immigrant students within the achievement distribution of comparable natives — I show that second-generation immigrants dramatically lag behind their native peers, despite having been fully exposed to the same educational system. This underachievement can only be partially explained by traditional mechanisms of stratification by social class broadly defined. On the contrary, migrant-specific penalties and socio-economic penalties come forth as two distinct dimensions of educational inequalities. Even if all Western European countries experience some degree of migrant penalties, sharp cross-country differences exist in their intensity. Moreover, as shown with additional analyses on Turkish second-generation immigrants, such cross-country differences cannot be reduced to the different origin compositions of immigrant populations. Moving from four theoretical dimensions (school duration, stratification, standardization, and resources allocation), I identify as potentially relevant characteristics of the educational system: (i) the entry age in the (pre)school system; (ii) the age at which students are tracked into differentiated curricula; (iii) the degree to which second-generation immigrants are marginalized in low-quality schools. After investigating the relevance of these factors with several statistical and set-theoretic methods, I apply fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs-QCA) in order to systematically assess which kinds of educational systems — conceived as configurations of institutional elements embedded in national contexts — bring about severe migrant achievement penalties, and which do not. My findings indicate that several combinations of conditions can alternatively lead to equally severe penalties. In post-war immigration countries, early tracking into differentiated curricula produces severe penalties only when it marginalizes second-generation immigrants in second-tier tracks, and consequently low-quality schools. On the contrary, in new-immigration countries tracking by itself is sufficient to bring about severe penalties, while in Scandinavian countries — where most immigrants speak a language that is very distant from the national one — the decisive detrimental factor is the delayed entry of pupils into (pre)school. In order to avoid severe penalties, educational systems must be designed in a way to include children at a relatively young age. In post-war immigration countries where linguistic distance is low, this element is sufficient to avoid severe achievement penalties, but new immigration societies have more complex institutional pathways, since they combine a not-late entry in the (pre)school system with a late tracking into differentiated curricula and a low degree of marginalization of second-generation immigrants.

Preschool attendance is widely recognized as a key ingredient for later socioeconomic success, mothers' labor market participation, and leveling the playing field for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is still relatively scarce, particularly in Europe. Using data from the 2011 Austrian European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we contribute to this literature by studying the effects of having attended preschool for the adult Austrian population. We find strong and positive effects of preschool attendance on later educational attainment, the probability of working full time, hourly wages, and the probability that the mother is in the labor market. Full time workers at the bottom and the top of the distribution benefit less than those in the middle. Women in particular benefit more in terms of years of schooling and the probability of working full time. Other disadvantaged groups (second generation migrants; people with less educated parents) also often benefit more in terms of education and work.

This study documents how organizational strategies underlying college counseling departments modify counselors’ ability to perform their academic and college advising duties. To examine this, fifteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews with public high school counselors in Southern California were conducted. A district’s commitment to college access and opportunity, as well as parents’ expectations for maintaining a college-going culture, shaped the nature of college counseling and organizational habitus in a school. Counselors reported that access to different forms of institutional support and resources diminish or exacerbate the structural constraints known to surface in public schools. This influenced when and how counselors advised students, which offered different views of the educational opportunity structure. Additionally, findings indicate that both college preparation programs and culturally sensitive counselors work to remedy educational disparities and increase the college enrollment rates of working-class minority students.