From GED to College: The Role of Age and Timing in Educational Stratification

GED certification has changed the landscape of educational stratification in the U.S. People who complete high school by obtaining a GED are less likely to go to college than those who obtain a traditional high school diploma. Disparities in family background and cognitive skills explain some of the differences in college entry rates between the two groups. Past research, however, ignores the effect of age and timing on each group's transition from secondary to post-secondary schooling. Age is likely to influence college entry because educational attainment is a highly age-dependent process. GED recipients complete high school at later ages than traditional graduates and take longer to make the transition from high school to college. These differences in age are likely to influence the odds of college entry, independent of factors such as family background and cognitive skills. I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and discrete time hazard analysis to investigate the relationship between the timing of educational transitions and differences in rates of college entry between traditional graduates and GED recipients. The analysis shows that adjusting for differences in family background and cognitive skills accounts for less than half the difference in rates of college entry while controlling for age and timing accounts for much of the remaining difference. Once social background, cognitive skills and age are controlled, estimated adjusted cumulative probabilities of college entry are nearly equal between the two groups

Family Size and Educational Attainment in Indonesia: A Cohort Perspective

Numerous studies of educational attainment in the United States have shown that schooling is negatively correlated with sibship size. That is, children with fewer brothers and sisters obtain more schooling than those with more siblings. Moreover, this negative relationship exists even after family socioeconomic characteristics are controlled (Featherman and Hauser 1978; Hauser and Sewell 1985; Mare and Chen 1986; Blake 1989). This finding is often explained using an argument of finite resources: parents have limited time, money, and patience to devote to the education of their children, and those with fewer children can invest more per child

Family Size and Educational Attainment in Indonesia: A Cohort Perspective

Numerous studies of educational attainment in the United States have shown that schooling is negatively correlated with sibship size. That is, children with fewer brothers and sisters obtain more schooling than those with more siblings. Moreover, this negative relationship exists even after family socioeconomic characteristics are controlled (Featherman and Hauser 1978; Hauser and Sewell 1985; Mare and Chen 1986; Blake 1989). This finding is often explained using an argument of finite resources: parents have limited time, money, and patience to devote to the education of their children, and those with fewer children can invest more per child

How Do Women's Educational Attainments Affect the Educational Attainment of the Next Generation?

The effect of the socioeconomic characteristics in one generation on the socioeconomic achievement of the next generation is the central concern of social stratification research. Researchers typically address this issue by analyzing the associations between the characteristics of parents and offspring. This approach, however, focuses on observed parent-offspring pairs and ignores that changes in the socioeconomic characteristics of one generation may alter the numbers and types of intergenerational family relationships that are created in the next one. Models of intergenerational effects that include marriage and fertility, as well as the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status, yield a richer account of intergenerational effects at both the family and population levels. When applied to a large sample of Indonesian women and their families, these models show that the effects of women’s educational attainment on the educational attainments of the next generation are positive. However, the beneficial effects of increases in women’s schooling on the educational attainment of their children are partially offset at the population level by a reduction in the overall number of children that a more educated population of women bears and enhanced by the more favorable marriage partners of better educated women

Joint Legal Custody and Child Support Payments: Are There Lasting Custody Effects?

This paper addresses the question: Does joint legal custody increase child support payments? It describes differences in formal child support payments for those with and without joint legal custody among divorce cases. It examines legal custody differences in the short-term after divorce as well as in the intermediate term, through the sixth year after divorce, to assess whether any economic benefits of joint legal custody endure through a significant part of childhood.To the extent that legal custody differences in payments exist, we ask whether family and case characteristics, such as parents' incomes, number of children, and amount of child support ordersaccount for these differences. Finally, the paper uses statistical methods that adjust for the fact that unmeasured characteristics may affect both the adoption of joint legal custody as well as higher child support payments. Ignoring these unmeasured differences may overstate the benefits of joint legalcustody for child support payments. The paper aims to provide a less biased estimate of the effects of joint legal custody on child support payments than is available from most previous studies

Demographic Pathways of Intergenerational Effects: Fertility, Mortality, Marriage and Women's Schooling in Indonesia

We use data from Indonesia and a demographic modeling strategy to estimate the total effect of increasing women’s schooling for the schooling of the next generation. This approach differs from standard approaches in that we include an estimate of how changes in women’s schooling affect children’s schooling not only directly but also through women’s choice of mate, marriage timing, fertility timing, fertility levels and the mortality of women and children. Each of these demographic factors can affect the relative number of children who will achieve different levels of schooling in the subsequent generation as a result of increasing women’s schooling in the previous generation. Some mechanisms, such as assortative mating, have very strong positive effects while others, such as marriage timing and fertility levels have offsetting effects. Differential mortality has a positive effect. Our results also demonstrate that the effects of expansions in women’s schooling depend on both the starting distribution of women’s schooling and where in the distribution women’s schooling increases

Inequality and the association between involuntary job loss and depressive symptoms

a b s t r a c t Although socioeconomic status (SES) has been to shown to be associated with susceptibility to involuntary job loss as well as with health, the ways in which individual SES indicators may moderate the job loss-health association remain underexplored. Using data from the Americans' Changing Lives study, we estimate the ways in which the association between job loss and depressive symptoms depends on five aspects of SES: education, income, occupational prestige, wealth, and homeownership. Our findings indicate that higher SES prior to job loss is not uniformly associated with fewer depressive symptoms. Higher education and lower prestige appear to buffer the health impacts of job loss, while financial indicators do not. These results have a number of implications for understanding the multidimensional role that social inequality plays in shaping the health effects of job loss