Sociology of Education

This study evaluates the effects of intensive music education on disadvantaged children in the northern suburbs of Paris, using a quasi-experimental design with entropy balancing. We focus on a four-year compulsory violin program delivered during school hours to children ages four to seven. Data were collected between 2020 and 2024 from academic assessments and national standardized tests across 57 schools. We investigate whether intensive music training improves cognitive and academic outcomes and how these effects vary by socioeconomic background. Preliminary findings reveal short-term gains in writing, numeracy, and syllabic skills—particularly among socially disadvantaged preschoolers—but these benefits diminish over time. By the end of second grade, negative effects appear in language skills, notably for lower socioeconomic status students. These patterns may result from reduced instructional time in core subjects and unequal compensatory support at home. The study underscores the risks of embedding intensive extracurricular programs within school hours and cautions against relying solely on academic outcomes to justify arts education.

This study seeks to understand the extent of and explanations for the institutionalization of sexuality and gender identity in U.S. higher education institutions (HEIs). Using original longitudinal data collected on a national probability sample of 234 four-year HEIs, covering 1980 to 2018, we examine whether and when HEIs establish two key lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) supportive features: LGBTQ resource centers and LGBTQ studies programs. We argue that sexuality and gender identity have not been institutionalized to the same extent as other diversity features because they remain contested or viewed with ambivalence in some HEIs. Findings suggest that institutions that already demonstrate support for gender diversity or are associated with other institutions that signal such support are more likely to institutionalize these supportive features. In the case of LGBTQ rights, HEIs may therefore be particularly responsive to their institutional environments.

The United States is a “schooled society”: one where formal education is viewed as a primary conduit between American cultural ideals and people's moral worth and social value. Sociologists of education have described resistance against this dominant model through disinvestment from school, particularly among some students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. Yet it remains unclear if “school-invested” students also enact resistance and if so, what such resistance entails and means for educational and social inequality. Bringing together the literatures on recognition and educational resistance, we argue that recognition of stigmatized educational groups by school-invested students may serve as an important form of educational resistance. We build this argument by drawing on unique multiwave interview data (n = 168) to investigate college students’ perceptions of college dropouts. We find that although a minority of respondents discursively deploy stigmatizing frames when describing dropouts, more draw on recognition frames to bridge moral and symbolic gaps between college students and particular dropouts. We also find that certain college experiences, particularly exposure to peers with complicated college trajectories, appear to change students’ narratives on dropout over time. We consider the implications of recognition-based resistance and the associated opportunities and limitations concerning inequality.

Vocational education and training (VET) is hailed for easing skill shortages and fostering inclusion. However, little is known about the factors influencing the choice between VET and general education. We conducted a vignette experiment with more than 11,500 respondents in seven European countries, asking respondents to assign fictitious 15-year-olds either to VET or to general education based on achievement, motivation, and sociodemographic profiles. Respondents consistently channeled students with low grades and low motivation into VET. This bias weakened but persisted among respondents who view VET as offering favorable labor market prospects. Boys, working-class youth, and adolescents outside large cities were also steered toward VET, although achievement effects outweighed ascriptive ones. These patterns hold across countries and respondent subgroups, indicating that VET is widely perceived as the less desirable educational pathway. Our findings suggest that VET is caught in a downward spiral in which the relative unattractiveness of VET and academic drift reinforce each other.

Research shows a link between wealth and educational attainment, but little work has examined wealth relationships from high school degree through graduate degree completion. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to study when and how wealth may advantage students along their entire educational trajectory. Using sequential logistic regression models (“Mare models”), we find that across transitions, wealth relationships are separate from income and parental education relationships. As observed for other socioeconomic dimensions, wealth relationships decrease at the transition to graduate school entry. However, we show that the wealth relationship substantially increases at the graduate degree completion transition, running counter to the waning pattern found for family income and parental education. We also reveal that, like other socioeconomic dimensions, these wealth relationships partially attenuate when we include early indicators of academic performance differentials. Our findings thus shed new light on the nature of wealth-based educational inequality in the United States.

Admission to selective colleges has grown more competitive, yielding student bodies that are unrepresentative of the U.S. population. Admission officers report using sorting (e.g., GPA, standardized tests) and concertedly cultivated (e.g., extracurricular activities) and ascriptive status (e.g., whether an applicant identifies as a member of a racially minoritized group) criteria to make decisions. Using latent class analysis, we identified three groupings of institutions based on the admission criteria they claim to value. Public institutions largely practiced a “coarse sieve” approach that relied on sorting criteria. Some private institutions practiced “fine sieve” admissions by emphasizing concertedly cultivated and ascriptive status criteria. A few privates employed the “double sieve” that combined sorting and concertedly cultivated criteria. Results illuminate the shape of the admissions sieve, identifying institutional contexts that inform the admissions practices selective colleges claim to use.

Social capital is widely cited as benefiting children’s school performance, but close inspection of existing research yields inconsistent findings. Focusing on intergenerational closure among parents of children in the same school, this article draws from a field experiment to test the effects of social capital on children’s achievement in reading and mathematics. When children were in first grade, their schools were randomly assigned to an after-school family-based intervention that boosts social capital. A total of 52 schools in Phoenix, Arizona, and San Antonio, Texas, containing over 3,000 first graders, participated in the study, with half the schools in each city assigned to the treatment group and half serving as no-treatment controls. Two years later, no differences in third-grade achievement were evident between children who had been in treatment schools versus control schools. By contrast, nonexperimental analyses of survey-based measures of social capital suggest positive effects on achievement, indicating that naïve estimates based on survey measures may be upwardly biased by unobserved conditions that lead to both stronger ties among parents and higher test scores. This article adds to a growing literature that raises doubts about the effects of this type of social capital for achievement outcomes among young children.

Many developing countries have experienced increasing spatial inequality, but little is known about the effect of community disadvantages on educational attainment in these societies. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (2010–2016), I examine the effect of community socioeconomic status (SES) on the transition into high school in urban and rural China, and I explore several mechanisms explaining the community effects. I adopt the generalized propensity score method to estimate the potential probability of high school entrance at different levels of community SES. Results show that community SES is positively associated with high school attendance in both urban and rural China, and the relationship is stronger in more disadvantaged communities in both contexts. In urban areas, the effect of community SES is partly attributable to collective socialization and children’s academic performance. In rural areas, spatial accessibility to high schools and children’s academic performance are the salient mechanisms.