The Shifting Salience of Skin Color for Educational Attainment

Partial funding for Open Access provided by the UMD Libraries' Open Access Publishing Fund.Findings of an association between skin color and educational attainment have been fairly consistent among Americans born before the civil rights era, but little is known regarding the persistence of this relationship in later born cohorts. The authors ask whether the association between skin color and educational attainment has changed between black American baby boomers and millennials. The authors observe a large and statistically significant decline in the association between skin color and educational attainment between baby boomer and millennial black women, whereas the decline in this association between the two cohorts of black men is smaller and nonsignificant. Compared with baby boomers, a greater percentage of the association between skin color and educational attainment among black millennials appears to reflect educational disparities in previous generations. These results emphasize the need to conceptualize colorism as an intersectional problem and suggest caution when generalizing evidence of colorism in earlier cohorts to young adults today

Genes, Education, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

Recent advances have led to the discovery of specific genetic variants that predict educational attainment. We study how these variants, summarized as a genetic score variable, are associated with human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We demonstrate that the same genetic score that predicts education is also associated with higher wages, but only among individuals with a college education. Moreover, the genetic gradient in wages has grown in more recent birth cohorts, consistent with interactions between technological change and labor market ability. We also show that individuals who grew up in economically disadvantaged households are less likely to go to college when compared to individuals with the same genetic score, but from higher socioeconomic status households. Our findings provide support for the idea that childhood socioeconomic status is an important moderator of the economic returns to genetic endowments. Moreover, the finding that childhood poverty limits the educational attainment of high-ability individuals suggests the existence of unrealized human potential

System management and compensatory parenting: Educational involvement after maternal incarceration

Research has demonstrated that paternal incarceration is associated with lower levels of educational involvement among fathers and primary caregivers, but little is known regarding caregiver educational involvement when mothers have been incarcerated. In this study, we present the first analysis of variation in school- and home-based educational involvement by maternal incarceration history, pairing survey and interview data to connect macro-level group differences with micro-level narratives of mothers’ involvement in their children's education. Our survey data demonstrate that children of ever-incarcerated mothers experience increased school-based educational involvement by their primary caregivers, regardless of whether the caregiver is the mother herself. Our interview data point to compensatory parenting as a key motivating factor in educational involvement, wherein a caregiver endeavors to “make up for” the child's history of maternal incarceration. Findings add to the literature demonstrating maternal incarceration as a distinct experience from both paternal incarceration and material disadvantage alone, and they suggest the need to explore the role of schools as potential points of productive institutional involvement for mothers with an incarceration history.https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.1233

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

sj-xlsx-9-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 – Supplemental material for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-9-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences by Amelia R. Branigan, Johanna G. Nunez, Mariya Adnan Khan and Rachel A. Gordon in Social Psychology Quarterly</p

sj-xlsx-7-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 – Supplemental material for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-7-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences by Amelia R. Branigan, Johanna G. Nunez, Mariya Adnan Khan and Rachel A. Gordon in Social Psychology Quarterly</p

sj-docx-10-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 – Supplemental material for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences

Supplemental material, sj-docx-10-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences by Amelia R. Branigan, Johanna G. Nunez, Mariya Adnan Khan and Rachel A. Gordon in Social Psychology Quarterly</p

sj-xlsx-1-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 – Supplemental material for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-1-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences by Amelia R. Branigan, Johanna G. Nunez, Mariya Adnan Khan and Rachel A. Gordon in Social Psychology Quarterly</p

sj-xlsx-2-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 – Supplemental material for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences

Supplemental material, sj-xlsx-2-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences by Amelia R. Branigan, Johanna G. Nunez, Mariya Adnan Khan and Rachel A. Gordon in Social Psychology Quarterly</p

sj-tiff-6-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 – Supplemental material for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences

Supplemental material, sj-tiff-6-spq-10.1177_01902725231196851 for Variation in Skin Red and Yellow Undertone: Reliability of Ratings and Predicted Relevance for Social Experiences by Amelia R. Branigan, Johanna G. Nunez, Mariya Adnan Khan and Rachel A. Gordon in Social Psychology Quarterly</p