Class origin and young adults’ re-enrollment
Introduction
The impact of social origin on educational decisions can be detected at almost every stage of a person's educational career. In the light of increasing participation in postsecondary education, there has been growing interest in social selectivity at the tertiary level. Although the impact of social origin on educational choices is found to be less pronounced at these higher levels of education, it still exists, even if previous educational achievement is held constant. Children from the lower classes enter higher education less frequently (cf. Alon and Tienda, 2007, Ayalon et al., 2008, Davies and Guppy, 1997, Karen, 2002, Shavit et al., 2007), and they are also less likely to progress to postgraduate studies (Mullen, Goyette, & Soares, 2003). Another strand of research examines the transition from higher education to work (e.g., Arum & Hout, 1998). This transition is often treated as a distinct event in the life course instead of as a “transitional phase” with several, individually distinct stages, although several studies have shown that it is difficult to define “the” transition as one single event (Bozick and DeLuca, 2005, Brückner and Mayer, 2005, Coleman, 1984, Jacob and Weiss, 2010, Scherer, 2005). One reason to expect a prolonged transition phase from education to work in the U.S. is the high participation rate of mature students in higher education which has been observed for quite a long time now (Slowey, 1988). In terms of social background, nontraditional and less cohesive patterns are often found among working-class children (Goldrick-Rab, 2006, Hearn, 1992). Goldrick-Rab (2006) even concludes that social class background is the most important factor affecting nontraditional attendance patterns.
Against this background, we focus in this article on one key aspect of nontraditional postsecondary enrollment patterns of young adults: the transition from the labor market (back) into higher education and the impact of social background on re-enrollment. The return from the labor market to the educational system can be regarded as a further educational threshold. The extensive findings on the influence of the socio-economic background on decision-making in educational transitions prompt inquiry into the impact of the parents’ social background on re-entry into education. In principle, both scenarios of social selectivity are possible. On the one hand, children from higher social backgrounds may be more likely to re-enter education because their parents encourage them to do so. This hypothesis is related to the theory of aversion to downward intergenerational class mobility (Breen & Goldthorpe, 1997), a frequently advanced explanation for class differences in educational decisions which has however rarely been tested directly (Gabay-Egozi et al., 2009, Stocké, 2007, van de Werfhorst and Hofstede, 2007). The case of late educational enrollment is a favorable constellation for testing hypotheses derived from this theory, since status reproduction failure can be operationalized directly by comparing parental class to the class position that the child has already reached. An opposing hypothesis assumes that lack of financial resources will cause lower-class students to delay their educational careers. In this case we would expect more working-class students to re-enroll, as this has been their intention ever since they left high school.
We test these competing hypotheses empirically by analyzing the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Youth 79 (NLSY79). This dataset enables us to operationalize the relative status achievement of parents and children directly and time varying. As a result, we do not find strong evidence for the “relative risk aversion” mechanism as predicted by the Breen–Goldthorpe model but academic performance to be the most important factor for re-enrollment decisions. The article closes with a discussion of our findings.
Section snippets
Re-enrollment and intergenerational social mobility
So far not many studies have examined the impact of social origin on re-entry into the educational system (Elman, 1998, Goldrick-Rab, 2006). Previous research on educational careers indicates that there is some evidence for social disparities. Using NLSY79 data, Oettinger (1993) and Light (1996) find that both low parental education and low family income have a negative impact on re-enrollment. A positive effect of the mother's education has been shown by Marcus (1986), who analyzes the NLS
Data
Capturing the overlap between educational careers and labor market entry requires access to detailed longitudinal data. Here we draw upon the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79, U.S. Department of Labor, 2008). The NLSY79 is a cohort panel containing 12,686 respondents born between 1957 and 1965 and starting in 1979. The response rate for the initial interview in the selected subgroup was 90 percent of all people designated for interviewing. From then on, annual response rates
Results
We first present some descriptive results on the re-enrollment over time in different classes. Fig. 1 shows survivor curves for the event of re-enrollment after having entered the first fulltime job. Children from service-class backgrounds re-enroll much faster than all others, as the survivor curve is much steeper. This shape supports our hypothesis 1a on a relatively short delay of re-enrollment for higher-class children. They also show a higher overall probability of ultimate event
Summary and conclusion
In our analysis we find that effects of parental class are present even in very late educational decisions, i.e., for re-enrollment back from the labor market to higher education. In other words, the so-called “second chance” or late educational transitions of young adults are still influenced by parental class and wealth. This makes further investigations into the reasons for the long-lasting effects of social origin worthwhile. Such investigations should include a more detailed assessment of
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