Sociology of Education

In recent years, many Americans have grown critical of the cost of college, often drawing distinctions between which degrees are more and less worthwhile. These discussions have emerged at the same time that working-class and indebted students have become increasingly prevalent in higher education, underscoring vast differences in social origins and economic resources even among students at the same institution. Do Americans tend to make sharp distinctions between degrees they consider worthwhile and not? Or are these considerations reserved mostly for students with social and economic disadvantages? In this article, we assess how social class and educational debt affect public beliefs about what students should study in college. We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 1,121) that asked respondents how likely they would be to recommend fields of study for students with different combinations of social class background and educational debt. We find that Americans make clear class-based distinctions in recommending fields of study. Working-class students, much more than upper-middle-class students, are expected to study majors with high pay and employability. By comparison, we find few effects of student loans net of social class. Data from the open-ended portion show that Americans are more likely to consider upper-middle-class students’ skills and interests and working-class students’ chances of getting a good job, suggesting that working-class students face a societal emphasis on attaining financial security that encourages their restraint in young adulthood. Implications for the study of social class and higher education are discussed.

Intergenerational educational mobility reflects a welfare state's ability to provide citizens with opportunities to climb the social ladder. Representing two distinct welfare state types, studies have contrasted mobility patterns in Scandinavia and the United States but have provided no consistent answer as to who achieves the highest level of intergenerational educational mobility. We conduct a meticulous examination of intergenerational educational mobility in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United States for cohorts born between 1958 and 1987 using comparable operationalizations and methods and the best available data (administrative data in Scandinavia and eight surveys in the United States). We focus on methods that capture relative mobility. Across models, we find that inequality in Scandinavia is 20 percent to 30 percent lower than in the United States. A multiverse analysis, which can run a large number of models within a single framework, shows that our results are robust to alternative variable specifications.

Although educational aspirations are widely viewed as central to attainment, less is known about how they translate into academic behavior. This study investigates the behavioral consequences of aspirations using nationally representative data from South Korea and dynamic panel models with individual fixed effects. Results show that aspirations predict both self-study time and private tutoring time even after accounting for prior behavior and unobserved individual characteristics. However, the aspiration–behavior link varies by age and socioeconomic status, especially for tutoring time. The aspiration–tutoring relationship strengthens as students grow older and is more pronounced among those with highly educated parents. These patterns reveal systematic differences in aspiration–investment alignment, which refers to the extent to which students can convert their educational goals into concrete academic behaviors, highlighting a novel mechanism through which socioeconomic disparities in educational outcomes persist.

Higher education institutions widely promote engaged scholarship, yet it remains undervalued in academic reward systems, such as hiring and promotion, and it is especially risky for early career scholars. Using a unique data set of 138,738 applications for assistant professor positions, this study links large-scale demographic hiring data with applicants’ substantive presentation of self through the language they use in their materials regarding engaged scholarship. Results show that women of color are the most likely to present themselves as engaged scholars, drawing on long-standing traditions of public-serving epistemologies among historically marginalized scholars, even as such work remains unevenly rewarded. Centering applicants rather than evaluators highlights how scholars navigate disciplinary norms and exercise agency in shaping their professional identities. These patterns reveal how inequalities, epistemic and otherwise, may be reproduced in academic evaluation and show which scholars might be taking early career risks to pursue public-oriented scholarship—a core mission of public institutions.

Teacher expectations are key predictors of student outcomes, yet how they are produced and negotiated in practice remains understudied. Drawing on ethnographic research in two progressive high schools serving low-income students of color, we show expectations function less as individually held stable beliefs than as institutionally situated judgments that are continuously produced and revised through interaction and interpretation. We identify three shared, institutionally sanctioned cultural logics—care, success, and accountability—guiding teachers’ decisions, showing how tensions between them created uncertainty about responding to students’ needs. Sometimes, these tensions produced expectation drift: the process through which what teachers ask of students decreases or shifts over time. Rather than a simple lowering of standards, expectation drift reflects negotiated responses to structural constraints and institutional pressures. By portraying expectations as socially constructed and context-dependent, we show how expectation drift may both support student learning and school engagement and contribute to processes of reproduction.