Education and Social Class
1. What percentage of US adults do you think have a college degree?
Below are the percentages of adults over the age of 23 who have attained each degree in 2018 from Wikipedia:
2. Did you realize that so few people have a bachelor’s degree or higher? Does any of this surprise you?
Parent Education = Children’s Future Education
Parents’ educational levels correlate with children’s educational attainment. The graph below shows that the less education that parents have, the less education their children obtain. In other words, if parents don’t have a college degree, the child is not likely to attain a college degree and visa-versa; parents with an advanced degree are more likely to have children who attain an advanced degree themselves.
Below is another way of showing the educational level of parents (on the left) influences the level of college education their children get (center) and what social class the children end up in (right)
4. What are some conclusions or questions you have about how parent educational level affects children’s educational probability?
Education = Income
Here is a 2011 post from sociological images that has a lot of info showing the connection between your degree and your income, especially that more contributing than any other factor, educational levels to lifetime income earnings and the earnings gap gets wider over time.
Here is a graph of mean education compared to mean income from U. Maryland sociology professor Phil Cohen:
5. What are some of the reasons that higher-income might lead to higher test scores?
Family shapes people differently based on the social class of the family. Melvin Kohn and Annette Lareau are two of the more noted researchers who studied families and social class. Their research found that parents from working-class households emphasize following rules and discipline while upper-middle-class parents teach their kids to take risks, negotiate, and think creatively. Sociologist Annette Lareau explains these differences in her research. Her book, Unequal Childhoods is explained in the Atlantic here. And there is an excerpt available here.
Lareau identifies these two styles:
Concerted Cultivation: The parenting style, favored by middle-class families, in which parents encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority, and enroll their children in extensive organized activity participation. This style helps children in middle-class careers, teaches them to question people in authority, develops a large vocabulary, and makes them comfortable in discussions with people of authority. However, it gives the children a sense of entitlement.
Accomplishment of Natural Growth: The parenting style, favored by working-class and lower-class families, in which parents issue directives to their children rather than negotiations, encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and do not structure their children’s daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method has benefits that prepare the children for a job in “working” class jobs, teaches the children to respect and take the advice of people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age.
Student discussion:
Why do you think each social class shapes kids these ways? Brainstorm your own hypothesis here.
Analyze either SHS families in general or your family – which style do you think they are and why? Can you give a specific example?
6. Conclusions or questions about the reciprocal connection between education and income?
Higher Income = More Elite College (from no college all the way to the Ivies)
And the list below shows how schools rank in terms of students from the top 1% of income compared to the number of students from the bottom 60%:
“…income gaps between fields are often larger than gaps between those with college degrees and those without them. Natasha Quadlin finds that This gap is in many ways due to differences in funding at the start of college that determines which majors students choose….She finds that students who pay for college with loans are more likely to major in applied non-STEM fields, such as business and nursing, and they are less likely to be undeclared. However, students whose funding comes primarily from grants or family members are more likely to choose academic majors like sociology or English and STEM majors like biology or computer science.”
Matchmaking and Education
Besides the likelihood of meeting friends and potential spouses at college, there are specific apps and websites to help matchmake couples from Ivy League+ schools. This 2019 Harvard Gazette article reviews three of them including:
- BluesMatch, a company based in London that matches Oxford, Cambridge, and Ivy League graduates, said it makes sense that as people experience search fatigue from broad, impersonal online dating pools, they’re drawn to sites that narrow the field by matching users’ interests or backgrounds. “People get tired of using Tinder or Match because there are too many people,” said Law during a Skype chat from London. “And they often don’t have the level of conversation that someone from Oxford or the Ivy League gets excited by.”
- Elegant Introductions out of Miami, are matchmakers for a clientele based in Miami and Boston. Most of their clients, said Gold, are highly educated and professionally successful, are involved in their community, appreciate the arts, and have been screened to make sure they are who they say they are. Applicants have to show proof of an Ivy League degree.
Additionally, if you are interested:
