Sociology of Education

Landmark research from before the 2010s shows that college women rarely held institutions responsible for allowing rape-prone party contexts to persist and failing to support survivors. Yet the college landscape has changed profoundly since these studies were published, with prominent anti-rape campaigns and new guidelines to Title IX policy. To update a research stream that has provided the basis for theorizing about sexual violence in college peer cultures, we examine 121 intensive interviews with 68 women who are at heightened risk of party rape because of their involvement in historically White sororities. Several key findings emerged. First, women were highly invested in the Greek party circuit. Second, participants blamed institutions for failing to do more to keep them safe. Reflecting their focus on institutions, women also proposed that institutional authorities change their policies so sororities could move parties out of fraternity houses and into sorority houses. Third, women took on the labor of trying to protect themselves and other women at parties by designating monitors. However, they reported that with this system, other women could be deemed responsible, not for being assaulted but for failing to prevent rape. Finally, women found ways to identify and exclude men they deemed “rapey” from Greek gatherings. However, boycotting an entire fraternity was more controversial and harder to sustain. Overall, women’s preferred prevention strategies reflect a strong desire to avoid disturbing the Greek party scene. Implications for research and policy on gender and sexual violence prevention in higher education are discussed.

Racialized tracking is central to sociological explanations for racially stratified educational outcomes. However, school officials’ decision-making is of debated importance for explaining racialized tracking. We contribute to this literature by examining the effects of schools’ enrollment policies for Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Using a unique combination of school survey data and administrative data from Wisconsin, we examine what happens to racial inequality in AP participation when school officials enforce performance-based selection criteria, which we call “course gatekeeping.” We find that course gatekeeping has racially disproportionate effects. Although racialized differences in prior achievement partially explain the especially large negative effects among students of color, course gatekeeping producesBlack-white and Hispanic-white disparities in participation even among students with similar, relatively low prior achievement. We further find that course gatekeeping has longer-run effects, particularly discouraging Black and Asian or Pacific Islander students from attending highly selective four-year colleges.

Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we estimate associations of paternal incarceration with three measures of teens’ attitudes and expectations: (1) optimism about the future, (2) perceived importance of college graduation, and (3) perceived likelihood of college graduation. Results suggest that whereas optimism toward the future and the importance of college are resilient in the face of paternal incarceration, teens’ expectations of actual college completion are reduced, particularly for Black youth. An examination of micro-, meso-, and macro-level mechanisms suggests that early consequences of paternal incarceration influence perceptions of future educational trajectories. Our findings point to the complexity of contemporary teens’ college-related attitudes in the wake of the prison boom. Signs of optimism surfaced, yet obstacles associated with paternal incarceration represent a type of racialized constraint. An updating of the educational expectations literature is needed to account for the racialized nature of the era of mass incarceration in the United States.

In recent years, it has been well established that study abroad participation is a socially selective process. Today, scholars generally focus on single social markers, often using cross-sectional data. In this article, we instead adopt an intersectional and longitudinal approach to improve our understanding of the development of social selectivity in study abroad, with a particular focus on the intersection between socioeconomic background and gender. Our analyses are based on the Learning Conditions and Student Orientations (N = 49,931), a representative survey of German higher education students, and covers the period 1994 to 2016. Our analyses indicate that social selectivity in German study abroad programs increased in 2003 and remained stable afterward, which can be partly explained by differences in cultural, economic, and social capital. Finally, our analysis suggests that cultural capital also explains the gender imbalance in study abroad programmes.