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 Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, this study examines parents' investments and engagement in the college-going…

Racialized tracking is central to sociological explanations for racially stratified educational outcomes. However, school officials' decision-making is of debated importance for explaining racialized tracking. We contribute to this literature by examining the effects of schools' enrollment policies for Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Using a…

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…

This article presents a new measure of curricular intensity that is objective, parsimonious, clearly defined, replicable, and comparable over time for use by researchers interested in examining trends, causes, and outcomes of high school course taking. After proposing a reduced-form version of Adelman's curricular intensity index comprised of…

The timing of a high school transfer may shape students' transitions to college through its (mis)alignment with the structure of the school year. A transfer that occurs during the summer interrupts the four-year high school career, whereas a transfer that occurs midyear disrupts both the four-year high school career and the structure of the school…

Despite the massive expansion of higher education in China since 1998, the cohort trends of urban and rural "hukou" holders in college attendance have widened sharply. Prevailing explanations emphasize the advantages of urban students over rural students in school quality and household financial resources. We propose the structural…

Official sanctioning of students by the criminal justice system is a long-hypothesized source of educational disadvantage, but its explanatory status remains unresolved. Few studies of the educational consequences of a criminal record account for alternative explanations such as low self-control, lack of parental supervision, deviant peers, and…

Parental income and wealth contribute to children's success but are at least partly endogenous to parents' cognitive and noncognitive skills. We estimate the degree to which mothers' skills measured in early adulthood confound the relationship between their economic resources and their children's postsecondary education outcomes. Analyses of…

Many minority, first-generation, and low-income students aspire to college; however, the college application process can present a significant obstacle. These students cannot always rely on their parents for college information and must instead turn to their high schools, where counselors are in a key position. Drawing on a two-year field study at…

Do schools reduce or perpetuate inequality by race and family income? Most studies conclude that schools play only a small role in explaining socioeconomic and racial disparities in educational outcomes, but they usually draw this conclusion based solely on test scores. We reconsider this finding using longitudinal data on test scores and…

The literature on neighborhood effects on schooling theorizes that neighborhood cultural context is an important mechanism generating such effects. However, explanations that rely on subcultural theories, such as oppositional culture, have met with considerable criticism on empirical grounds, and no alternative account of the cultural context of…

This article examines the extent to which indicators of the college-going climate of urban high schools are associated with students' application to, enrollment in, and choice among four-year colleges. The investigators examine two mechanisms by which high schools may shape college enrollment among low-income students in an urban school system:…

Previous research has shown that although a smaller proportion of black high school graduates than white high school graduates attend college, black high school graduates are more likely than white high school graduates to attend college net of differences in socioeconomic family background and academic performance. Yet, the overrepresentation of…

This article uses administrative data from the University of Texas at Austin to examine whether the number of classmates from the same high school at college entry influences college achievement, measured by grade point average (GPA) and persistence. For each freshman cohort from 1993 through 2003, the authors calculated the number and ethnic…

This study reconsidered school effects on college enrollment by focusing on strategies that schools use to facilitate college transitions. It also examined whether school strategies influence different outcomes for students from different racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Using data from the High School Effectiveness Study, the analysis…