Black Students' Graduation from Elite Colleges: Institutional Characteristics and Between-institution Differences

Among the nation’s elite colleges and universities, black graduation rates vary dramatically from institution to institution. Many sociologists have suggested that this is due not to differences in the student bodies but to institutional factors; however, this “institutional hypothesis” has not been recently examined empirically. We test the institutional hypothesis for a set of elite institutions using College and Beyond, a restricted dataset containing data for the entire 1989 cohort of 27 elite institutions, matched to institution-level data, employing HLM techniques. We ask three questions: Do institutional factors affect black students’ probability of graduation? Do they account for between-institution differences in black graduation? And are institutions where blacks have a high probability of graduation the same as or different from those where whites do? Testing for the effect of eight major institutional factors, we find, surprisingly, that only selectivity has a statistically significant effect. Contrary to common belief, selectivity improves black probabilities of graduation, and helps blacks more than it helps whites. It also accounts for roughly 38% of the between-institution variance in black graduation. Finally, we find that after controls, black and white probabilities of graduation across institutions are highly correlated (.909), such that institutions in which blacks are likely to graduate are those in which whites are likely to graduate, too. Findings suggest that researchers should examine other institutional factors in greater depth, as well as the role of pre-college preparation more seriously.Sociolog

How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Understandings of Poverty

African and African American StudiesSociolog

Cultural Diversity and Poverty Eradication

African and African American StudiesSociolog

Introduction: Reconsidering Culture and Poverty

To bridge the gap between poverty scholars and culture scholars, the editors have assembled papers around the topic "Reconsidering Culture and Poverty." Chapters concern cultural orientations concerning upward mobility, finding a job, and sexual behavior, fatherhood, civic participation, and other topics. Contributors include Nathan Fosse, Joshua Guetzkow, Biju Rao, Paromita Sanyal, Sandra Smith, Stephen Vaisey, Maureen Waller, and William Julius Wilson. We hope that this issue will demonstrate the importance of cultural concepts for poverty research, serve as a model and a resource for poverty scholars who wish to incorporate cultural concepts into their research, assist in the training of future scholars working at the nexus of poverty and culture, and identify crucial areas for future methodological, theoretical, and empirical development.African and African American StudiesSociolog

Reconsidering Culture and Poverty

African and African American StudiesSociolog

2019-2020 Master Class - David Jackson (Trombone)

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_masterclasses/1193/thumbnail.jp

Making Friends in Violent Neighborhoods: Strategies among Elementary School Children

Abstract: While many studies have examined friendship formation among children in conventional contexts, comparatively fewer have examined how the process is shaped by neighborhood violence. The literature on violence and gangs has identified coping strategies that likely affect friendships, but most children in violent neighborhoods are not gang members, and not all friendship relations involve gangs. We examine the friendship-formation process based on in-depth interviews with 72 students, parents, and teachers in two elementary schools in violent Chicago neighborhoods. All students were African American boys and girls ages 11 to 15. We find that while conventional studies depict friendship formation among children as largely affective in nature, the process among the students we observed was, instead, primarily strategic. The children's strategies were not singular but heterogeneous and malleable in nature. We identify and document five distinct strategies: protection seeking, avoidance, testing, cultivating questioners, and kin reliance. Girls were as affected as boys were, and they also reported additional preoccupations associated with sexual violence. We discuss implications for theories of friendship formation, violence, and neighborhood effects