Adolescents’ Friends and College Completion: The Moderating Role of Parental Social Closure

• In Event: 435 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Social Capital across Schooling Contexts

Abstract

The current focus of recent school reform efforts has downplayed factors external to schools that are intuitively and empirically known to be associated with short- and long-term educational outcomes. One of these under-appreciated factors is the cultural resources adolescents’ access through their friendships. This study uses panel data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) to address this issue by examining how friends’ cultural resources in high school are associated with adolescents’ college completion. Specifically, we create a sociometric measure of friends’ cultural resources (friends’ importance of getting good grades) in the ELS base-year, when all respondents were in Grade 10. We then estimate the association between this measure and adolescents’ likelihood of attaining a four-year college degree by the third follow-up, when all base-year respondents were 10 years beyond their expected high school graduation. In addition, we examine how this association is moderated by parental social closure. We find that having resource-rich friends matters not only through its direct association with college completion, but also through the access these friends provide to parental networks that generate mutual duties and expectations, motivate information channels, and reinforce desirable social norms. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results on adolescent friendships and social capital for recent policy efforts directed at promoting adolescents’ access to resource-rich friends and varying their school-based social networks through formal and informal means.

Authors

• Brian Vincent Carolan, Montclair State University

• David T. Lardier Jr., Montclair State University