Family Socioeconomic Status, Peers, and the Path to College

Drawing on the primary/secondary effects perspective of educational inequality, this mixed methods study investigated connections between high school students’ trajectories through college preparatory course work and their relationships with parents and peers as a channel in the intergenerational tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2014-11, Vol.61 (4), p.602-624
Main Authors: Crosnoe, Robert, Muller, Chandra
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
College Students
Colleges
Educational attainment
Educational Inequality
Electives
Enrollments
Ethnography
Families & family life
Grade point average
High School Students
High Schools
Higher education
Inequality
Intergenerational relationships
Intergenerational transmission
Parent education
Parents
Parents & parenting
Peer Groups
Peers
Polls & surveys
School based
Secondary school students
Secondary schools
Socioeconomic factors
Socioeconomic Status
Socioeconomics
Students
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Summary:Drawing on the primary/secondary effects perspective of educational inequality, this mixed methods study investigated connections between high school students’ trajectories through college preparatory course work and their relationships with parents and peers as a channel in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality. Growth curve and multilevel analyses of national survey and transcript data revealed that having college-educated parents differentiated students’ enrollment in advanced course work at the start of high school and that this initial disparity was stably maintained over subsequent years. During this starting period of high school, exposure to school-based peer groups characterized by higher levels of parent education appeared to amplify these course work disparities between students with and without college-educated parents. Ethnographic data from a single high school pointed to possible mechanisms for these patterns, including the tendency for students with college-educated parents to have more information about the relative weight of grades, core courses, and electives in college going and for academically relevant information from school peers with college-educated parents to matter most to students’ course work when it matched what was coming from their own parents.
ISSN:0037-7791
1533-8533
DOI:10.1525/sp.2014.12255