Sociology of Education

In the United States, women are more likely than men to enter and complete college, but they remain underrepresented among baccalaureates in science-related majors. We show that in a cohort of college entrants who graduated from high school in 2004, men were more than twice as likely as women to complete baccalaureate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, including premed fields, and more likely to persist in STEM/biomed after entering these majors by sophomore year. Conversely, women were more than twice as likely as men to earn baccalaureates in a health field, although persistence in health was low for both genders. We show that gender gaps in high school academic achievement, self-assessed math ability, and family-work orientation are only weakly associated with gender gaps in STEM completion and persistence. Gender differences in occupational plans, by contrast, are strongly associated with gender gaps in STEM outcomes, even in models that assume plans are endogenous to academic achievement, self-assessed math ability, and family-work orientation. These results can inform efforts to mitigate gender gaps in STEM attainment.

Previous research suggests high school counselors are not living up to their potential as social/emotional, academic, and postsecondary counselors. This article addresses this concern by studying how schools and districts utilize counselors. Through interviews and observations of high school counselors, administrators, and counselor educators in an urban midwestern community, I find that counselors suffer from role ambiguity and role conflict due to lack of a clear job description, overlap with similar professions, supervision by noncounseling administrators, inadequate forms of performance evaluation, and conflict between their roles as counselors and educators. This conflict leads to poor boundaries at work, with counselors receiving an overwhelming amount of noncounseling duties that reduce their time with students. High school counselors have the potential to improve student social and academic outcomes, but these obstacles of role ambiguity and role conflict reduce them to school managers rather than master’s-level trained educators with a mental health background.

Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, we analyze quantitative administrative and survey data and qualitative archival data to examine the organizational character of standardized test cheating among educators in Georgia elementary schools. Applying a theoretical typology that identifies distinct forms of rule breaking in bureaucratic organizations, we find that teacher-focused, individual-level explanations for cheating are inadequate, particularly in the context of large-scale cheating outbreaks. Our findings suggest cheating scandals tend to arise when rule-breaking decisions shift toward higher levels of the educational bureaucracy, and school and district leaders enact multiple strategies to motivate coordinated cheating efforts among lower-level educators. In these scenarios, a “bad apples” explanation focused on rogue teachers fails to account for the systematic organizational underpinnings of standardized test cheating. We describe the institutional and organizational predictors of organized adult cheating on standardized tests, and we conclude with a discussion of our findings’ implications for education policy and research.

A long-standing consensus among sociologists holds that educational attainment has an equalizing effect that increases mobility by moderating other avenues of intergenerational status transmission. This study argues that the evidence supporting this consensus may be distorted by two problems: measurement error in parents’ socioeconomic standing and the educational system’s tendency to progressively select people predisposed for mobility rather than to actually affect mobility. Analyses of family income mobility that address both of these problems in three longitudinal surveys converge on new findings. Intergenerational mobility is significantly lower among high school dropouts than among others, but there are no significant differences in mobility across higher education levels. This is consistent with compensatory advantage processes among the least educated in which individuals from advantaged backgrounds use family-based resources to compensate for their lack of human capital.

Cross-national analyses of university curricula are rare, particularly with a focus on internationalization, commonly studied as impacting higher education through the mobility of people, programs, and campuses. By contrast, we argue that university knowledge shapes globalization by producing various sociopolitical conceptions beyond the nation-state. We examine variants of such a globalized society in 442,283 study programs from 17,129 universities in 183 countries. Three variants stand out, which vary across disciplines: an interstate model (prevalent in business and political science), a regional model (in political science and law), and a global model (in development studies and natural sciences). Regression models carried out on a subset of these data indicate that internationalized curricula are more likely in business schools, in universities with international offices, in those with a large number of social science offerings, and in those with membership in international university associations. We discuss these findings and their links to changes in universities’ environment, stressing the recursive relationship between globalization and higher education.