Coursework: ITP Seminar

Jordan Conwell, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sociology/faculty/jac24892

Title: Educational Attainment and Wealth Mobility in the Student Debt Cohort


Abstract: The paper to be presented assesses intergenerational wealth mobility by level of completed schooling (less than high school, high school, associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, or master’s degree or higher) using data from the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), with the oldest cohort members now followed up to age 40. This provides a test of the hypothesis that education is a “Great Equalizer” of economic mobility outcomes that is novel in three ways: I consider the outcome of wealth mobility, at times in comparison to the literature’s more commonly studied outcome of income mobility; consider both parent-child wealth correlations and the direction of positional wealth mobility transitions of one decile or more; and estimate pooled results and then test for potential heterogeneity between Blacks, Hispanics, and those who are neither Black nor Hispanic. After presenting results, I will discuss implications for the understanding of education’s potential meritocratic power its debt financing era, with an emphasis on current debates about the value of bachelor’s and graduate level higher education for contemporary cohorts.

Karl Vachuska, Graduate Student, Sociology, UW-Madison

Title: The effect of college attendance on mid-life cognitive outcomes: A causal decomposition approach using the High School and Beyond data

Abstact: This study investigates the potential role of baccalaureatecollege attendance in mitigating inequities in cognitive function in midlifethat are rooted in social origins. Using data from the High School and Beyondstudy, we apply Yu and Elwert’s (2023) framework to causally decomposecognitive outcomes between those who had at least one parent who obtained abaccalaureate degree and those who did not) into components attributable tosample members’ college attendance and components not attributable to theircollege attendance. Fundamentally, our analysis estimates how disparities inmidlife cognitive function would shift if college attendance was assignedindependent of social origin. We find that college attendance explainsapproximately 20% of the difference in average mid-life cognition of childrenwhose parents did and did not attend college—and almost entirely throughdifferential college attendance rates between the two groups rather than thedifference in the effects of attendance or the process of selection.

Bill Carbonaro, Professor, Sociology, University of Notre Dame
https://sociology.nd.edu/people/william-carbonaro/

Title: Racialinequality in high-school math course enrollments: the long-term effects ofearly inequalities

Abstract TBA

Elly Field, Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University

Title: Understanding the ‘Package Deal’: Disentangling Parents’ Intertwined Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods

Abstract: My research takes as a starting point the education policies that link schools and neighborhoods by assigning students to schools based on where they live. These policies, in effect, build segregated schools from segregated neighborhoods. Qualitative work has documented that parents often account for this link when deciding where to live, citing a desire to find the “package deal” of a good neighborhood with a good local school. Yet, in studying how race shapes parents’ preferences, past experimental research has only examined these contexts in isolation. Using an original stated-choice experiment, I propose and test two theoretical frameworks for how the package deal influences parents’ joint preferences for schools and neighborhoods. I find that the package deal means that parents’ preferences for neighborhoods are shaped by the characteristics of the local schools and that their preferences for schools are shaped by the surrounding neighborhood. Further, I find that White and Latino parents seek out racially isolated schools and neighborhoods together. For White families, this means that when considering a majority non-White neighborhood, the package deal remains unappealing even when the school is predominantly White. In contrast,Black parents prefer to avoid being a racial minority in both their schools and neighborhoods but are satisfied when just one context is majority Black. I discuss the implications of these intertwined, interactive preferences for research on racial segregation and inequality, in particular how individual preferences shape racial segregation and how the link between schools and neighborhoods affects segregation dynamics.

No ITP seminar meeting for Thanksgiving recess

Erin Gill, Graduate Student, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, UW-Madison

Title: Can state nondiscrimination protections mitigate bullying and attempted suicide among LGB students?
 

Abstract: Statepolicies that prohibit discrimination in schools based on students’ sexualorientation act as a reparative solution to reducing lesbian, gay, and bisexual(LGB) students’ exposure to harm in schools. In this study, I test the impactof sexual orientation protections in state nondiscrimination policies on LGBstudents’ rates of being bullied and attempting suicide. Data for this studycomes from three sources: (1) nondiscrimination protections from 1985-2021state policy documents, (2) student reports of being bullied and attemptingsuicide from the 2015-2021 state-level Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and (3)state-level characteristics from the 2015-2021 American Community Survey across22 U.S. states. Preliminary results from a difference-in-differences analysissuggest that sexual orientation protections in nondiscrimination state policiesreduce bullying, but not attempted suicide rates, among LGB students. Statepolicymakers will be interested in the findings of this study as they continueto face competing political pressures to expand or restrict LGBTQ+ students’rights in schools.