Educational Inequality by Place across Two Cohorts in the Early 21st Century United States

• In Event: 4461 - Space and Place Across the Urban-Rural Axis

Abstract

Previous scholars have explored differences across urban places, producing a theory of neighborhood effects. They have debated how these geographic differences are shaped by selection or causation, as well as by structure or culture. Other researchers have explored how people's outcomes differ from those of others if they live not in urban, but in rural places. The following paper combines these two literatures to derive predictions for how high school students who live in rural, suburban, and urban areas may face different types of educational inequality. In the current version, the paper assesses how socioeconomic selection and causation may shape the transitions that students make at the end of and immediately after high school, and how these factors differ by location. It compares results from models based on a cohort who became seniors in 2004, four years before the recession, and 2012, four years after the economic crash. In brief, the findings suggest urban students had more success at making subsequent transitions than did both suburban and rural students, and that this variation is partially associated with socioeconomic differences between families. The differences between students by place were stronger among those who left high school in the early 2000s than among those who did so 8 years later. In the version to be presented at ASA, the paper will explore evidence of whether and how these lives are shaped by culture and structure that varies geographically.

Authors

• Alair MacLean, Washington State University Vancouver

• Xiao Li, Washington State University