Social Equalization or Social Reproduction? Educational Stratification by Social Origin in the United States amid Expansion

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Expansion of Higher Education

Abstract

While a large body of work has documented the growth of higher education in the U.S. and elsewhere, we know relatively less about the consequences of this expansion for equality of educational opportunity by social origin. In this study, I draw upon five nationally representative datasets that span birth cohorts from the 1960s to the 1990s in the U.S. to assess the link between social origin and both vertical and horizontal educational stratification amid expansion. Through a set of pooled ordinal logistic regressions, results show that expansion has led to decreasing social origin effects on attainment level (i.e., vertical stratification), but increasing effects in terms of institutional selectivity level, major earnings level, and academic performance level (i.e., horizontal stratification). In turn, multinomial logistic regressions reveal that gaps at top tier levels by parental education have increased across all outcomes, but gaps at the middle and lowest tiers vary. Consequently, although we find some evidence of social equalization over time, the relative weight of growing horizontal stratification points to a much stronger tendency toward social reproduction across cohorts in the United States.

Author

• Wesley Jeffrey, University of California-Merced