This article investigates the racial and gender dynamics of educational inequality in suburban public schools in the United States during an era of rapid demographic change. As suburban schools transition from predominantly White enclaves to more diverse settings, it is unclear to what extent the popular narrative of “suburban advantage” holds for newcomers. Using a longitudinal data set of majority

Graduating from college is widely associated with social and personal advancement, yet many young graduates are not experiencing these benefits. Drawing on 127 interviews with college graduates in the United States and Spain who face employment precarity or economic instability, this study asks: How do these graduates understand their social positions and worth? How does the institution of higher education

Substantial social stratification research conceptualizes education as a series of standard transitions from one stage to the next, such as from high school to college. Yet less research examines mandatory transitions within each educational stage, which we call “intermediate educational transitions.” In this article, we examine a crucial intermediate transition in U.S. higher education, shifting from

This article investigates the understudied relationship between teacher socioeconomic status (SES) and retention. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and longitudinal data from 378 mathematics teachers, we use logistic regression to examine whether teacher SES, conceptualized and measured in terms of their economic, social, and cultural capital, is associated with their school, district

Academic mismatch, the incompatibility between applicants’/students’ aptitude and their desired/current academic program, is considered a key predictor of degree attainment. Evaluations of this link tend to be cross-sectional, however, focusing on specific stages of the college pipeline and ignoring mismatch at prior or later stages and their potential outcomes. We developed and tested a longitudinal

Admission to selective colleges has grown more competitive, yielding student bodies that are unrepresentative of the U.S. population. Admission officers report using sorting (e.g., GPA, standardized tests) and concertedly cultivated (e.g., extracurricular activities) and ascriptive status (e.g., whether an applicant identifies as a member of a racially minoritized group) criteria to make decisions

Social origin affects not only access to higher education but also how students proceed through higher education. Based on the argument that an advantageous family background facilitates linear study trajectories through parents’ provision of cultural and economic resources, this article investigates study trajectories in Germany and the United States, assessing the institutional structures as an intermediating

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is a major U.S. educational problem. Official data show that Black boys are disciplined at the highest rates of any racial and gender subgroup. Scholars suggest the “criminal” Black male image shapes teachers’ views and treatment of their Black male students. Yet few studies examine the everyday mechanisms of racial discipline disparities, particularly

In recent years, it has been well established that study abroad participation is a socially selective process. Today, scholars generally focus on single social markers, often using cross-sectional ...

Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we estimate associations of paternal incarceration with three measures of teens’ attitudes and expectations: (1) optimism about the...

Racialized tracking is central to sociological explanations for racially stratified educational outcomes. However, school officials’ decision-making is of debated importance for explaining racializ...

Landmark research from before the 2010s shows that college women rarely held institutions responsible for allowing rape-prone party contexts to persist and failing to support survivors. Yet the col...

Using data on ninth graders, math teachers, and schools from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we investigate the following questions: (1) How do ninth graders’ ...

Although there is an abundance of research on the association of school poverty (or socioeconomic status) and test score level, there is very little rigorous longitudinal evidence on the cumulative...

Since post-World War II and especially throughout the 1990s, the globalization of a liberal international order propelled a wave of education reforms around the world. However, recent challenges to...

Scholarship examining the role of cultural capital in school outcomes in relation to race and ethnicity in the French context is scarce. This article seeks to test how various potential forms of cu...

U.S. colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to appear racially diverse, but have yet to account systematically for a quickly growing contingent of multiracial-identifying students....

What are the economic consequences of college noncompletion? Given escalating student debt, is “some college” still worth it? This article applies augmented inverse probability weighting to the Nat...

There has been widespread concern about widening disparities in parental investments that may be associated with widening gaps in educational attainment. Using data from the National Education Long...

U.S. studies have found that stratified graduate education accounts for most of the relatively strong intergenerational socioeconomic association among postgraduate degree holders. The same associa...

Asian American students are frequently stereotyped to be hardworking and academically talented. To what extent are teacher appraisals of Asian students influenced by such racial stereotypes? This a...

This article argues that the organizational structure and culture of schools may impede the prevention of violence in America’s schools, specifically threat assessment and management for students o...

How are patterns of segregation related to families’ engagement in public-school choice policies across U.S. metropolitan areas? This article examines how segregation in urban public schools and th...

The education sector in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has experienced a surge of neoliberal reforms over the past few decades, primarily led by the World Bank (WB). One of these reform a...

Students across the United States experience high levels of contact with the police. To clarify the causal relationships of this contact with educational outcomes and the mechanisms by which such r...

Largely overlooked in the empirical literature on gentrification are the potential effects school closures have in the process. This study begins to fill this gap by integrating longitudinal data o...

Why are some schools home to Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim student organizations but others are not? In this article, we draw on theories of student mobilization, especially recent theoretica...

Canizales, Stephanie L. “Educational Meaning Making and Language Learning: Understanding the Educational Incorporation of Unaccompanied, Undocumented Latinx Youth Workers in the United States.” Sociology of Education 94(3):175–90. https://doi.org/10.1177_0038040721996004

The year students take Algebra I historically determines how far they progress in secondary mathematics, creating complex equity issues around access to this course. By examining a case study of on...

How do undergraduates make their first course decisions, and are these decisions fateful? Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 students at an admissions-selective university, we show that i...

Growing evidence suggests that contrary to popular belief, schools mostly do not generate achievement gaps in cognitive skills but, rather, reflect the inequalities that already exist. In the case of socioeconomic status, exposure to school often reduces gaps. Surprisingly little is known, however, about whether this pattern extends to gender gaps in cognitive skills. We compare how gender gaps in

Researchers have studied academic orientation—students’ valuing of and commitment to education—as in part a function of a cultural fit between students’ cultural capital, competencies, identity, and the institutional culture of the education system. Recent research on students’ aspirations and commitment highlights the moral undertones of such cultural fit. Scholars have identified the perceived moral

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics

The mission of Sociology of Education (SOE) is to publish “research that examines how social institutions and individuals’ experiences within these institutions affect educational processes and social development.” As editor of SOE, Linda Renzulli has done a stellar job carrying out this mission. As SOE’s new editors, we are committed to building on the journal’s outstanding legacy of publishing methodologically

Expanded school-choice policies have weakened the traditional link between residence and school assignment. These policies have created new school options and new labor for families to manage and divide. Drawing on interviews with 90 mothers and 12 fathers of elementary-age children, I demonstrate that mothers across class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds absorb the labor of school decision-making.

Over the last 5 years and 21 issues of Sociology of Education, I have learned so much. First and foremost, thank you for the honor of serving our scholarly community. I have read over 1,000 new manuscripts and learned something new from every single one. Although SOE cannot publish every manuscript, I believe there is value in all scholarship submitted. One of my goals as editor was to ensure that

Past work and college–access programs often treat college knowledge as discrete pieces of information and focus on the amount of available college information. I use ethnographic and multiwave interview data to compare college–aspiring working- and middle–class black 9th and 11th graders across almost two years in high school along with their post–high school updates. Respondents were exposed to college–going

How does schooling affect inequality in students’ academic skills? Studies comparing children’s trajectories during summers and school years provide a provocative way of addressing this question, but the most persuasive seasonal studies (1) focus primarily on skill gaps between social categories (e.g., social class, race/ethnicity), which constitute only a small fraction of overall skill inequality

Social capital is widely cited as benefiting children’s school performance, but close inspection of existing research yields inconsistent findings. Focusing on intergenerational closure among parents of children in the same school, this article draws from a field experiment to test the effects of social capital on children’s achievement in reading and mathematics. When children were in first grade

We ask whether patterns of racial ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in educational attainment are amplified or attenuated when we take a longer view of educational careers. We propose a model of staged advantage to understand how educational inequalities evolve over the life course. Distinct from cumulative advantage, staged advantage asserts that inequalities in education ebb and flow over the

Students with aligned educational and occupational expectations have improved college and labor market outcomes. Despite extensive knowledge about the ways social background and school context contribute to educational expectations, less is known about the role of social intuitions in shaping expectational alignment. Drawing on data from the 2009 High School Longitudinal Study, I estimate the magnitude

Riegle-Crumb, Catherine, and Menglu Peng. “Examining High School Students’ Gendered Beliefs about Math: Predictors and Implications for Choice of STEM College Majors.”Sociology of Education 94(3):227–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407211014777

Social capital is broadly beneficial, but parents reap particular benefits from network ties. Schools are key organizations through which parents develop ties. In this article, we examine school-based networks that provide valuable resources. What factors are associated with greater access to key resources such as child care, parenting advice, and educational information? Using network data from mothers

In recent years, research has brought attention to the heterogeneity of resources that first-generation students bring with them to higher education and the factors that assist in these students’ social and academic adjustment to university life. However, few studies have focused on how these students’ early socialization and experiences over the life course influence their adjustment experiences to

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ([IDEA] 2004; IDEA Amendments 1997) is a civil rights–based law designed to protect the rights of students with disabilities in U.S. schools. However, decades after the initial passage of IDEA, racial inequity in special education classifications, placements, and suspensions are evident. In this article, we focus on understanding how racial discipline

Utilizing the High School Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students, this study investigates the factors that predict different beliefs about gendered math ability and the potential consequences for students’ choices to enter gender-segregated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors in college. Among other results, analyses reveal that

In recent decades, the black–white test score disparity has decreased, and the test score disparity between children of high- versus low-income parents has increased. This study focuses on a comparison that has, to date, fallen between the separate literatures on these diverging trends: black and white students whose parents have similarly low, middle, or high incomes (i.e., same income or race within

Immigration scholars agree that educational attainment is essential for the success of immigrant youth in U.S. society and functions as a key indicator of how youth will fare in their transition into adulthood. Research warns of downward or stagnant mobility for people with lower levels of educational attainment. Yet much existing research takes for granted that immigrant youth have access to a normative

For decades, social theorists have posited—and descriptive accounts have shown—that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial for those who possess less of the economic, social, and

Scholarship on adult education throughout the life course focuses on the relationship between education and upward mobility. Scholars rarely examine how adults’ educational aspirations or trajectories are affected by downward mobility or an increasingly precarious labor market. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with 21 job seekers in the post–Great Recession labor market in the United States

Existing research generally confirms a countercyclical education enrollment, whereby youths seek shelter in the educational system to avoid hardships in the labor market: the “discouraged worker” thesis. Alternatively, the “encouraged worker” thesis predicts that economic downturns steer individuals away from education because of higher opportunity costs. This study provides a formal test of these

National high-stakes exams are a fundamental structural feature of education systems around the world. Despite their importance in shaping educational stratification, little is known about the social processes that influence how and why national high-stakes exams are used at early ages on a global basis. I argue that global trends in the use of primary-level high-stakes exams during the postwar period

Research shows charter schools are more segregated by race and class than are traditional public schools. I investigate an underexamined mechanism for this segregation: Charter schools project identities corresponding to parents’ race- and class-specific parenting styles and educational values. I use computational text analysis to detect the emphasis on inquiry-based learning in the websites of all

Broad higher education contexts shape how community college students and postsecondary personnel approach transfer from community colleges to baccalaureate-granting institutions. We leverage the concept of strategic action fields, an organizational theory illuminating processes that play out as actors determine “who gets what” in an existing power structure, to understand the role of political-ecological

This article assesses the relationships between race, gender, and parental college savings. Some prior studies have investigated race differences in parental college savings, yet none have taken an intersectional approach, and most of these studies were conducted with cohorts of students who predate key demographic changes among U.S. college goers (e.g., the reversal of the gender gap in college completion)

The advent of mass schooling played a pivotal role in European societies of the later nineteenth century, transforming rural peasants into national citizens. The late-twentieth-century global expansion of higher education ushered in new transformations, propelling societal rationalization and organizing, and knitting the world into a more integrated society and economy. We address four key dynamics:

Cross-national analyses of university curricula are rare, particularly with a focus on internationalization, commonly studied as impacting higher education through the mobility of people, programs, and campuses. By contrast, we argue that university knowledge shapes globalization by producing various sociopolitical conceptions beyond the nation-state. We examine variants of such a globalized society

Previous research suggests high school counselors are not living up to their potential as social/emotional, academic, and postsecondary counselors. This article addresses this concern by studying how schools and districts utilize counselors. Through interviews and observations of high school counselors, administrators, and counselor educators in an urban midwestern community, I find that counselors