Latinx/White Differences in Postsecondary Trajectories: The Role of Parents’ Preferences

As postsecondary schooling expands, stratification in attainment persists along ethnoracial lines. We build on current research investigating ethnoracial differences in the transition to college by interrogating parents’ preference for their child’s residence during college. We extend research in two ways. First, we predict whether parents’ live-at-home preference is associated with behavior at multiple points in the college-going pipeline. Second, we investigate whether the effect of parents’ live-at-home preference differs by ethnoracial group. Results suggest that students whose parents prefer that they live at home are less likely to apply to four-year universities, less likely to attend four-year universities, less likely to enroll full-time among those who are attending four-year universities, and more likely to live with their parents or elsewhere off campus during college. Results also suggest that parents’ live-at-home preference has less of an impact on Latinx students’ likelihood of applying to and attending four-year universities than white students

Family Legacy or Family Pioneer? Social Class Differences in the Way Adolescents Construct College-Going

In an era of heightened educational expectations, it can be difficult to discern why would-be first-generation college-going adolescents are less likely to enroll in college than non-first generation adolescents. This article draws from cultural sociology to interpret differences in the way that adolescents socially construct the transition into college. Our data come from focus groups with 37 boys and 43 girls conducted in a racially diverse school district in central Texas in the United States. We find that adolescents are generally highly ambitious in their educational expectations. However, adolescents who would be the first in their family to attend college have distinctive cultural frames related to the postsecondary transition compared to adolescents whose parents went to college. Would-be first generation adolescents perceive going to college as being a family pioneer rather than continuing the family legacy, which represents a point of departure from their family of origin. Identifying distinct cultural frames and the ways that school context shapes students’ cultural frames enhances our understanding of social class differences in the college-going behavior of American adolescents

White and Black Boys Fall Further Behind White Girls during the Transition to High School

Educational transitions, such as the one from middle school to high school, are difficult for all students but may be especially difficult for students from marginalized groups. During these critical periods in schooling, academic status can be reshaped and inequality between racial/ethnic groups and gender can deepen. Former PRC trainees April Sutton and Amy Langenkamp, along with PRC faculty research associate Chandra Muller and Kathryn Schiller (SUNY Albany), use nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to investigate how the transition to high school affects the GPAs of young white, black, and Latino men and women. They show that white and black male students, especially higher-achieving black students, suffer the greatest academic losses at the high school starting gate. Notably, these young men do not recover lost academic ground the following year. Given the role that high school GPA plays in gender and racial/ethnic disparities in educational attainment, this research has significant implications for inequalities within and beyond high school.Population Research Cente