{"id":2457,"date":"2008-04-03T11:46:33","date_gmt":"2008-04-03T11:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/03\/social-class-and-educational-a\/"},"modified":"2008-04-03T11:46:33","modified_gmt":"2008-04-03T11:46:33","slug":"social-class-and-educational-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/03\/social-class-and-educational-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Class and Educational Access"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college<\/a>, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos<\/cite>, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family’s money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real:<\/p>\n

\n

The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores and came from families earning more than $100,000 per year. Despite their academic shortcomings, 58.4 percent of these students went on to college. For high-income students in the second achievement quartile–still below the median–the college-going rate was significantly higher, 85.3 percent.<\/p>\n

This is a higher rate than that for those directly opposite A.J.–students from the highest achievement quartile and the lowest income level, less than $20,000 per year. 80.3 percent of these meritorious poor students went to college, which means that nearly 20 percent did not. High-achieving wealthy students, in contrast, went to college at a 96.2 percent clip. In other words, high-achieving poor students are five times more likely than high-achieving rich students to skip college in the first two years after high school.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I feel like I’m pounding on this issue a lot lately, but it’s important, and not discussed anywhere near enough. For whatever combination of historical reasons, it’s taboo to talk seriously about class in America, but it’s a very real issue, with very real consequences for students and families. The wealthy do very well here, while the poor see roadblocks thrown up in their path again and again, and end up trapped in bad circumstances.<\/p>\n

Children from wealthy families have access to resources and connections that low-income children simply do not. No matter how much we try to pretend otherwise, class is a huge problem in this country, and it’s not going to get any better until people face up to it.<\/p>\n

But I’m sure some angry preacher ad-libbed something regrettable in a sermon recently, and it’s much more important that we run around getting ritual denunciations from everybody.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family’s money. Drawing… Continue reading Social Class and Educational Access<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,47,13,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-class_issues","category-economics","category-education","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}