Prior research suggests teachers’ evaluations may be influenced by students’ socioeconomic background, yet most evidence comes from experimental settings that overlook biases arising in real student-teacher interactions. This article exploits a 2016 Danish reform that introduced external evaluation of a ninth-grade essay exam to examine whether teachers grade socioeconomically advantaged students more favorably than do external examiners. Using a difference-in-differences design comparing assessments affected and unaffected by the reform, I find that teacher involvement increases the socioeconomic grading gap by 15 percent to 20 percent. Further analyses show this effect is largely explained by objective measures of prior academic performance, suggesting it reflects not socioeconomic bias per se but teachers’ reliance on academic reputations when assigning grades.
Using ethnographic observations and interviews with students and staff in a college access nonprofit (CAN), I show that college-going inequalities may also reflect structurally based emotional barriers and that these barriers can be overcome through opportunities to imagine futures with positive emotional valences where the student “fits” in college, and where college is a “fit” for the student. Before joining the CAN, students aspired to attend college, but their sense of fit was low and grounded in negative emotions (e.g., worries about challenges, ambivalence about college choices). Through CAN-sponsored college visits and precollege career-opportunity programs, students were able to imagine futures where they fit in college and where college fit their goals—imagining futures with positive emotional associations. This sense of fit allowed students to confidently make emotionally informed decisions about colleges and majors. I argue emotional barriers play an underdiscussed role in college transitions and clarify how emotions, by undergirding college decisions, shape youths’ paths to college.
Research shows a link between wealth and educational attainment, but little work has examined wealth relationships from high school degree through graduate degree completion. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to study when and how wealth may advantage students along their entire educational trajectory. Using sequential logistic regression models (“Mare models”), we find that across transitions, wealth relationships are separate from income and parental education relationships. As observed for other socioeconomic dimensions, wealth relationships decrease at the transition to graduate school entry. However, we show that the wealth relationship substantially increases at the graduate degree completion transition, running counter to the waning pattern found for family income and parental education. We also reveal that, like other socioeconomic dimensions, these wealth relationships partially attenuate when we include early indicators of academic performance differentials. Our findings thus shed new light on the nature of wealth-based educational inequality in the United States.
This study evaluates the effects of intensive music education on disadvantaged children in the northern suburbs of Paris, using a quasi-experimental design with entropy balancing. We focus on a four-year compulsory violin program delivered during school hours to children ages four to seven. Data were collected between 2020 and 2024 from academic assessments and national standardized tests across 57 schools. We investigate whether intensive music training improves cognitive and academic outcomes and how these effects vary by socioeconomic background. Preliminary findings reveal short-term gains in writing, numeracy, and syllabic skills—particularly among socially disadvantaged preschoolers—but these benefits diminish over time. By the end of second grade, negative effects appear in language skills, notably for lower socioeconomic status students. These patterns may result from reduced instructional time in core subjects and unequal compensatory support at home. The study underscores the risks of embedding intensive extracurricular programs within school hours and cautions against relying solely on academic outcomes to justify arts education.
Vocational education and training (VET) is hailed for easing skill shortages and fostering inclusion. However, little is known about the factors influencing the choice between VET and general education. We conducted a vignette experiment with more than 11,500 respondents in seven European countries, asking respondents to assign fictitious 15-year-olds either to VET or to general education based on achievement, motivation, and sociodemographic profiles. Respondents consistently channeled students with low grades and low motivation into VET. This bias weakened but persisted among respondents who view VET as offering favorable labor market prospects. Boys, working-class youth, and adolescents outside large cities were also steered toward VET, although achievement effects outweighed ascriptive ones. These patterns hold across countries and respondent subgroups, indicating that VET is widely perceived as the less desirable educational pathway. Our findings suggest that VET is caught in a downward spiral in which the relative unattractiveness of VET and academic drift reinforce each other.
Teacher expectations are key predictors of student outcomes, yet how they are produced and negotiated in practice remains understudied. Drawing on ethnographic research in two progressive high schools serving low-income students of color, we show expectations function less as individually held stable beliefs than as institutionally situated judgments that are continuously produced and revised through interaction and interpretation. We identify three shared, institutionally sanctioned cultural logics-care, success, and accountability-guiding teachers' decisions, showing how tensions between them created uncertainty about responding to students' needs. Sometimes, these tensions produced expectation drift: the process through which what teachers ask of students decreases or shifts over time. Rather than a simple lowering of standards, expectation drift reflects negotiated responses to structural constraints and institutional pressures. By portraying expectations as socially constructed and context-dependent, we show how expectation drift may both support student learning and school engagement and contribute to processes of reproduction.
Although educational aspirations are widely viewed as central to attainment, less is known about how they translate into academic behavior. This study investigates the behavioral consequences of aspirations using nationally representative data from South Korea and dynamic panel models with individual fixed effects. Results show that aspirations predict both self-study time and private tutoring time even after accounting for prior behavior and unobserved individual characteristics. However, the aspiration-behavior link varies by age and socioeconomic status, especially for tutoring time. The aspiration-tutoring relationship strengthens as students grow older and is more pronounced among those with highly educated parents. These patterns reveal systematic differences in aspiration-investment alignment, which refers to the extent to which students can convert their educational goals into concrete academic behaviors, highlighting a novel mechanism through which socioeconomic disparities in educational outcomes persist.
The United States is a "schooled society": one where formal education is viewed as a primary conduit between American cultural ideals and people's moral worth and social value. Sociologists of education have described resistance against this dominant model through disinvestment from school, particularly among some students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. Yet it remains unclear if "school-invested" students also enact resistance and if so, what such resistance entails and means for educational and social inequality. Bringing together the literatures on recognition and educational resistance, we argue that recognition of stigmatized educational groups by school-invested students may serve as an important form of educational resistance. We build this argument by drawing on unique multiwave interview data (n = 168) to investigate college students' perceptions of college dropouts. We find that although a minority of respondents discursively deploy stigmatizing frames when describing dropouts, more draw on recognition frames to bridge moral and symbolic gaps between college students and particular dropouts. We also find that certain college experiences, particularly exposure to peers with complicated college trajectories, appear to change students' narratives on dropout over time. We consider the implications of recognition-based resistance and the associated opportunities and limitations concerning inequality.
In recent years, many Americans have grown critical of the cost of college, often drawing distinctions between which degrees are more and less worthwhile. These discussions have emerged at the same time that working-class and indebted students have become increasingly prevalent in higher education, underscoring vast differences in social origins and economic resources even among students at the same institution. Do Americans tend to make sharp distinctions between degrees they consider worthwhile and not? Or are these considerations reserved mostly for students with social and economic disadvantages? In this article, we assess how social class and educational debt affect public beliefs about what students should study in college. We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 1,121) that asked respondents how likely they would be to recommend fields of study for students with different combinations of social class background and educational debt. We find that Americans make clear class-based distinctions in recommending fields of study. Working-class students, much more than upper-middle-class students, are expected to study majors with high pay and employability. By comparison, we find few effects of student loans net of social class. Data from the open-ended portion show that Americans are more likely to consider upper-middle-class students' skills and interests and working-class students' chances of getting a good job, suggesting that working-class students face a societal emphasis on attaining financial security that encourages their restraint in young adulthood. Implications for the study of social class and higher education are discussed.
Higher education institutions widely promote engaged scholarship, yet it remains undervalued in academic reward systems, such as hiring and promotion, and it is especially risky for early career scholars. Using a unique data set of 138,738 applications for assistant professor positions, this study links large-scale demographic hiring data with applicants' substantive presentation of self through the language they use in their materials regarding engaged scholarship. Results show that women of color are the most likely to present themselves as engaged scholars, drawing on long-standing traditions of public-serving epistemologies among historically marginalized scholars, even as such work remains unevenly rewarded. Centering applicants rather than evaluators highlights how scholars navigate disciplinary norms and exercise agency in shaping their professional identities. These patterns reveal how inequalities, epistemic and otherwise, may be reproduced in academic evaluation and show which scholars might be taking early career risks to pursue public-oriented scholarship-a core mission of public institutions.
Intergenerational educational mobility reflects a welfare state's ability to provide citizens with opportunities to climb the social ladder. Representing two distinct welfare state types, studies have contrasted mobility patterns in Scandinavia and the United States but have provided no consistent answer as to who achieves the highest level of intergenerational educational mobility. We conduct a meticulous examination of intergenerational educational mobility in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United States for cohorts born between 1958 and 1987 using comparable operationalizations and methods and the best available data (administrative data in Scandinavia and eight surveys in the United States). We focus on methods that capture relative mobility. Across models, we find that inequality in Scandinavia is 20 percent to 30 percent lower than in the United States. A multiverse analysis, which can run a large number of models within a single framework, shows that our results are robust to alternative variable specifications.
This study seeks to understand the extent of and explanations for the institutionalization of sexuality and gender identity in U.S. higher education institutions (HEIs). Using original longitudinal data collected on a national probability sample of 234 four-year HEIs, covering 1980 to 2018, we examine whether and when HEIs establish two key lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) supportive features: LGBTQ resource centers and LGBTQ studies programs. We argue that sexuality and gender identity have not been institutionalized to the same extent as other diversity features because they remain contested or viewed with ambivalence in some HEIs. Findings suggest that institutions that already demonstrate support for gender diversity or are associated with other institutions that signal such support are more likely to institutionalize these supportive features. In the case of LGBTQ rights, HEIs may therefore be particularly responsive to their institutional environments.
Drawing on interview and observational data of college students and academic advisers at one research-intensive, public university, this article describes similarities and differences in how students from different social class backgrounds engage with academic advisers. Both middle-class and working-class students were comfortable seeking help to resolve immediate questions and concerns. Advisers' efforts at establishing rapport and reaching out to students contributed to this parity. However, only middle-class students proactively cultivated their advisers' familiarity to ensure their advisers would remember them and provide more personalized guidance in the future. Advisers viewed middle-class students who cultivated familiarity in a positive light. Cultivating familiarity also allowed middle-class students to have rich advising conversations despite having no pressing issues to address. This analysis introduces cultivating familiarity as a mechanism through which middle-class students may secure advantages, even in contexts where both middle- and working-class students feel comfortable seeking help.
Previous work on student alienation in schools has emphasized alienation as either a source or consequence of students' lack of achievement. We show, in contrast, how alienation is common to a wide range of students' experiences in school, including among "high-achieving" students. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two disparate suburban high schools, we show how students' experience of alienation is linked to an exacting achievement narrative in U.S. schooling. We describe four forms of alienation: precarious character, unsound settings, impossible plots, and someone else's story, with the first three each connected to a different narrative element (character, setting, plot) and the fourth a more existential sense of narrative disconnect. We highlight the importance of alienation as a reason to de-emphasize schooling in solutions to inequality, making space for more radical politics of redistribution.
This article presents evidence on linear, nonlinear, and cumulative gender peer effects on test scores. The study utilizes exceptional Swedish data containing the history of the gender composition of students' classrooms from first to ninth grades. The analysis builds on school fixed effects with the added advantage of observing within-school variation in gender composition across actual classrooms. In contrast to what is often suggested in the literature, results show that gender composition does not uniformly affect boys and girls. More female-dominated classrooms slightly increase girls' and decrease boys' test scores, but these effects mainly concern students in classrooms with very skewed gender distributions. Moreover, effect sizes are very small, suggesting that classroom gender composition should not be a primary policy concern except when imbalances are large and cumulatively sustained. Findings also underscore the importance of accounting for nonlinearities and cumulative effects in research on gender peer effects.
Sociologists have long debated the role of higher education in shaping individuals' meritocratic beliefs, yet few studies have examined how these beliefs evolve during college years. This study addresses that gap by analyzing shifts in meritocratic beliefs among college students in China and exploring how these changes vary by socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing on data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey (BCSPS), we find that students' belief in meritocracy tends to decline as they progress through college. Over time, students place less emphasis on meritocratic factors and increasingly recognize the importance of nonmeritocratic factors in their future career prospects. Notably, students from lower socioeconomic status (SES) initially view nonmeritocratic elements as less important but gradually align with their higher-SES peers in acknowledging their significance. These findings shed light on the relationship between higher education and meritocratic beliefs, revealing how students' social origins shape their perceptions of social mobility within postsecondary institutions.
We examine exclusion and the persistence of STEM disparities for underrepresented minority (URM) students at one diverse college campus, a prestigious Minority Serving Institution (MSI). We draw on in-depth interviews with 28 class- and ethnoracially diverse children of immigrants to examine how they navigated their first year in biology. Our analysis reveals three types of students who differ in STEM capital: (1) STEM-thrivers, who inhabit a "bio-bubble"; (2) STEM-adapters, who straddle STEM-dominant and non-STEM-dominant peers; and (3) STEM-disconnected, who struggle in silence. We explain how this STEM capital typology is racially inflected, informed by both immigrant class origin and high school segregation. We call attention to social dynamics associated with STEM capital, the forms of exclusion encountered by URM students, and how universities, including MSIs, can reinforce STEM disparities that result in social reproduction.
Teachers' professional identities are the foundation of their practice. Previous scholarship has largely overlooked the extent to which the broader institutional environment shapes teachers' professional identities. In this study, I bridge institutional logics with theory on teacher professional identity to empirically examine the deeply institutionalized, taken-for-granted ways U.S. society has come to think of teaching (e.g., as a moral calling, as a profession, as labor), which are internalized by PK-12 teachers. I draw on survey data from 950 teachers across four U.S. states (California, New York, Florida, and Texas) and develop an original survey measure to capture what I term teachers'"institutionalized conceptions of teaching." Across diverse state policy contexts, I find that teachers' conceptions of teaching are guided by three underlying logics: (1) an accountability logic, (2) a democratic logic, and (3) a moral calling logic. I then examine the relationship between institutional logics and teachers' professional identities. I find that the taken-for-granted ways society frames teaching may be associated with dimensions of teachers' professional identity, such as self-efficacy and professional commitment. The findings suggest that supporting the professional well-being of PK-12 teachers may require shifting the deeply institutionalized norms of the profession to be more aligned with teachers' democratic aims-rather than maintaining our system's deep norms around external accountability and view of teaching as a moral calling. The study offers methodological contributions to the study of logics and practical implications for the field of teaching.
Latine college students in the United States face increasing isolation in universities designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). We contend that this pattern is not just a function of Latine selection into particular universities. Using enrollment data for public four-year undergraduate institutions from 1990 to 2019, we show that White student enrollment declines after universities cross the 25 percent Latine threshold and become designated as HSIs. Our layered model of college choice identifies multiple factors that activate White racial avoidance, pulling White students to Predominately White Institutions and pushing them away from HSIs. Controlling for local demographics in states and counties where HSIs are located, we estimate White student enrollments are 6 percent to 16 percent lower after HSI status. Student application and admission data for California and Texas four-year public universities illustrate that national patterns of White enrollment decline at HSI transition are likely driven by student and family preferences rather than organizational processes or seat constraints. Applications from White students are 12 percent lower after HSI status, yet admissions data, over which universities exert considerable control, show no change. Overall, our findings suggest White students respond to the high concentration of Latine students at HSIs with "white flight," contributing to racial segregation in higher education.
How does education-occupation mismatch shape racial/ethnic labor market inequality among highly educated workers? Bridging the literatures on racial/ethnic discrimination and labor market signaling, we propose a new concept, "racialized signaling," to explain inequality in the college-to-work transition, operationalized through education-occupation mismatch. We then use longitudinal data to examine the labor market consequences of racialized signaling, analyzing vertical and horizontal dimensions of mismatch. We find that Black and Hispanic graduates experience the negative consequences of mismatch most strongly at the point of occupational allocation relative to their White peers, whereas Asian graduates experience the greatest negative consequences of mismatch regarding wage penalties. Advanced degrees, STEM degrees, and degrees from more selective institutions have some moderating effects, but they do not fully level the playing field for minority graduates. Overall, our findings suggest education-occupation mismatch is a powerful, although heterogeneous, mechanism reproducing racial/ethnic inequality among the most educated segment of the U.S. population.
