Chapter 7 Family - Lecture notes 7 PDF

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Chapter 7 Family, Education and career  

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Thomas Jefferson urges the replacement of the corrupt old “aristocracy of wealth” with a new “aristocracy of virtue and talent” The aristocracy of wealth- could be eliminated by changing the laws of inheritance so that men would divide their landed estates equality among all their children and thus eventually arrive at a small holding The aristocracy of virtue and talent- characterizes Jefferson assumed were “scattered with equal hand” among all classes Jefferson founded the University of Virginia o Had father declaration of independence and founder of the university of Virginia written on his birthstone American political leaders have endorsed high rates of social mobility They have reflected the general values held by most Americans, believing that each generation should start fresh and compete in a “fair” way for those rewards Americans believe that young people ought to have careers based on their own talents and effort; rather than have their lives determined by the class positions of their parents “Equality of opportunity” not necessarily “equality of result” Americans hope that equality of opportunity can be achieved though the school system We ask why some individuals are more successful than others An individual’s chances for success will depend on both the available opportunities and his or her personnel characteristics, including family background and educational achievement Simple correlation and variance explained o Tell us how accurately we can predict the value of one variable by knowing the values or preceding variables Correlation is measured by coefficient what ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 In social science, most correlation coefficients are intermediate Variance explained is typically invoked when we are trying to measure the influence of a series of prior variables on a single dependent variable o Expressed as a percentage of total variance in the dependent variable, with higher percentage expressing stronger relationships

Blau and Duncan: analyzing mobility models 

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What makes the study of the social mobility of individuals complicated and debatable is that o Everything is related to everything else  A son’s occupational attainment is correlated with both his father’s occupational status and his own education o Simple casual chain Concretely sons with high status fathers have the opportunity to get good education to get good jobs  sons with low-status fathers cannot get a good education and end up with a crummy jon what is more important? o Education or easy access to the job

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Things would get more complicated if we considered additional factors o Race and parent’s education 1967- Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan introduced an innovative methodology for analyzing the complexities of career success and failure o “the American Occupational Structure”-analyzed the results of a large-scale national mobility survey, inspired much of the subsequent research in the field o Goal was to sort out he influence of each variable, independent of the others o Path analysis- helped conceptualize two key aspects of the problem  Chains of causation- fathers occupation influences sons’ education, which influences sons career prospects  Multiple casual pathways- fathers occupational influences sons’ education and later directly influences his job search  Emphasizes the temporal element in social mobility Their analysis dealt sequentially with family background, education, sons first job, and job at the time of the survey, examining the influences operating at each stage Both family background and education contribute to son’s socioeconomic status Family Background though education – rich kids generally get good educators; poor kids normally do not Family background independently- the father who uses his connections to help his child find a job or get him into the electrician’s union but also to the negative effects or racial discrimination on blacks Education independently- has a substantial independent effect; this tells us that educational achievement does more than just reflect the privileges or disadvantages of family background 2 reasons for unexplained variance o We cannot always measure our variables as precisely as we would like to  The fathers or sons’ job may be better or worse than it sounds from the rough occupational titles recorded in surveys o There are more influences that we do not include in the model  Some individuals are more ambitious and able than their academic accomplishments suggest Some of the unexplained variance in mobility models is certainly the result of dumb luck o Someone starts a career at just the right moment and gets ahead fast o Someone else experiences a traumatic event early in life and never quite gets over it

Jencks on Equality    

Blau and Duncan inspired a large new literature on status attainment Christopher Jencks and Harvard research team “inequality: a reassessment of the effect of family and schooling in America” and “who gets ahead?” They compared the life experience of brothers to get a better sense of the total influence of social origins on life changes The Harvard team was able to reduce the unexplained variance in the prediction of son’s occupation but further complicated matters by adding an outcome variable that went one step beyond (SES): sons’ earnings

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The resemblance between brothers or total family background explained almost half the variance in occupational status of men but less than a third of the Variance in their earnings Jencks seemed to be saying that the course of our lives is just more arbitrary than we care to admit The research demonstrated that the relationship between education and earnings is not smoothly linear but chunky A year of college income > high school income High school degree income increases 40% College degree income increase 50 % over high school degree The payoff of higher education is almost as great for those from poorer families as for those from more privileged background Before education is both a reflector of family background and an equalizer that offsets family background but now education has more independent influence Jencks made a point with radical political implications about the relationship between education and career Economic inequality in the U.S is very large and simply improving the quality of bad schools and reducing the differences among individuals in the number of years they attend school will not go very far in eliminating the economic difference o Education is only a modest determinant of individual incomes Jencks estimated that barley a quarter of the variance in the incomes of adult men could be predicted by combining all the usual predictors: family background, IQ score, years of education and even job title We need not accept the colossal inequalities in American society but we cannot fix them with education If we want to reduce economic inequality we must interfere with capitalist markers, so that CEO’s earn less and ordinary Blue- and White-collar workers earn more

The Fortunes of Sons and Daughters     

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Jencks and three colleagues examined the influence of family background on the household incomes of adult’s sons and daughters They didn’t explicitly consider the son or daughter education or occupation They studied the joint effect of the seven background factors Their focus on household income reminds us that income is a product of both the job market and the marriage market The family background factors they considered include o familiar items- like parents’ occupation and race o Southern origins o # of siblings o Parents education o Hispanic origins o Intact family We might expect men’s household income to more closely reflect inherited advantage or disadvantage, since men are traditionally more career oriented than women There is no significant difference between the distributions for sons and daughters

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The researchers wanted to see if the impact of family background had changed over time They compared the results for the 1990’s and 1970’s and found little differences The most notable change concerns daughters born into advantaged families o 5% less likely in 1990 to land in the top income group than they had in 1970 The age of growing inequality has no significantly altered the influence of family background on our life changes

Who goes to college?             

Not all people with college degrees have outstanding careers, people now have achieved important positions without them The income gap between the high school and college educated is growing Who comes out with a degree? Students from families in the top income quartile are more likely to attend and much more likely to complete college degree College attendance rates have increased substantially at all income levels in recent decades About half of high school graduates from the lowest income quartile enroll in college 26% of these low-income college students will finish a degree by 24 About 12% of the original cohort of low-income high school graduates Completion rate for their high-income high school classmates is about 5X higher The most obvious reason for the big class difference in college attendance and completion is that college is expensive and getting more so Another is the home advantage available to upper middle-class students is that Their parents have likely been to college Among students with top math scores who attended high school in early 1990’s 74% of those form high SES families competed college Form low SES families 15% got no further than high school just 29% completed college

The Stratification of higher education     

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Class not only influences the chance of continuing education after high school, it also influences the type of school selected Students from lower status families are more likely to enroll at 2-year community colleges Many community college students will drop out of school before they complete 2 years Others concentrate on 2-year technical courses that lead to careers as computer programmers, dental assistants, automobile mechanics. The American system of higher education is stratified according to the quality of the education provided and the particular career preparation emphasized, and this academic hierarchy is paralleled by the stratification of student’s families The connection between class and selective college admissions was clearly demonstrated in a national study conducted by Carnevale and Rose They divided first year college students into 4 socioeconomic quartiles based on family income, education, and occupation They found that students from the top 25% of families may up 3 quarters of the freshman classes at the most selective institutions Students from the bottom 50% of families account for only 10 %

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Students who attend selective schools have higher graduation rates, better access to postgraduate studies and somewhat higher lifetime earnings A college degree, even one from less competitive school, gives a substantial boost to the graduates earning power The academic criteria emphasized by the most selective schools clearly favor students from high status home homes over their less privileged peers Nearly 2/3 of students from the top SES quartile of families but only 7% of students from the bottom 50% score above the equivalent of 1,200 points on the SAT exam Selective institutions, even the most competitive among them, do not recruit students solely on the basis of academic merit Most give special consideration to so called legacies, athletes, and minority applications applicants Sons and daughters of selective college alumni grow up in affluent home with ample opportunities to develop cultural capital At selective institutions, the admissions deck seems stacked against white students from lower status families Urge selective institutions to adopt some form of economic affirmative action, that would consider the difficulties economically disadvantaged students must overcome Though selective college admissions are titled in favor of the sons and daughters of the upper middle class the majority of them will not win admission to a top tier institution About 37% of students from families in the top SES quartile will attend a mid-selectivity school 43% will attend a low – selectivity school or community college 20% will attend a highly selective institution...