Research

Areas of Interest

Social Stratification, Inequality & Social Mobility; Sociology of Education; Higher Education Accountability; For-Profit Education; Online Education; Race and Ethnicity; Social Demography; Sociology of the Family; Social Statistics; Research Methods

Selected Work

Higher Education and the Transition to Adulthood

College-Going in the Era of High Expectations: Racial/Ethnic Disparities in College Enrollment, 2006 to 2015. This article is published in Socius and linked here.

Adolescents with high educational expectations are more likely to enroll in college. Although most adolescents today report high educational expectations, there remains important racial/ethnic heterogeneity in college enrollment patterns. In particular, at every level of socioeconomic status, minority youth have higher educational expectations than their white peers yet enroll in college at lower rates. The rapidly increasing size and college enrollment of the Hispanic population motivate renewed examination of the expectation-enrollment relationship. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) and the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), the author examines whether the relationship between adolescent educational expectations and enrollment in a four-year college within two years of high school graduation differs by race/ethnicity and whether this relationship changed over time. The author finds that the expectation-enrollment relationship is positive for all students but is smaller for black and Hispanic students in the ELS cohort. However, by the HSLS cohort, the gaps have largely closed.

Higher Education and Student Debt

Predatory Inclusion in Non-Profit and For-Profit Online Education with Christian Smith, Laura Hamilton, and Charlie Eaton. This article is published in Social Forces and linked here.

In this project, we use institution-level data and individual-level data to test for the presence of “predatory inclusion” in online education. Predatory inclusion occurs, regardless of intent, when access to higher education via online modality is paired with negative outcomes, relative to similar students attending in-person. Our results suggest that predatory inclusion is present in both four-year non-profit and for-profit online education. Black students and/or low-income students are concentrated in online programs, and online education is associated with worse educational outcomes, including lower retention and graduation rates. Results are robust to a variety of specification choices, and a sensitivity analysis suggests that selection into online education is unlikely to explain the results fully. Despite accruing less debt overall, attending online is also associated with less desirable student loan repayment outcomes. We conclude by discussing policy implications, including better data reporting on online programs, regulating the use of for-profit Online Program Managers (OPMs) by non-profit universities, and combating for-profit efforts to manipulate repayment measures.

Administrative Burden in Federal Student Loan Repayment, and Socially Stratified Access to Income-Driven Repayment Plans with Adam Goldstein, Charlie Eaton, Parijat Chakrabarti, Jeremy Cohen, and Katie Donnelly. (This article is published in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences and linked here.)

In this paper we examine the socially stratified take-up of income-driven repayment plans among federal student loan borrowers with high debt payment burdens. Qualitative analysis of borrower complaints from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are used to document the administrative burdens that pervade borrowers’ experiences of federal student loan repayment. We also quantify the combined effects of high administrative burdens on social stratification of access to federal payment relief programs using administrative data from a 1 percent national sample of consumer credit reports spanning 2010-2019, as well as restricted-use survey data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Beginning Postsecondary Longitudinal Study (BPS). Socio-economic and racial gaps in take-up of income-driven repayment (IDR) plans are estimated among the subset of borrowers who would face high loan payment-to-income ratios under a standard repayment plan – a group for whom IDR participation would likely be most advantageous. Regression models estimated on the credit data extract indicate that among these highly debt-burdened borrowers, those residing in lower income and higher percentage Black census blocks are less likely to be enrolled in IDR. Lower income borrowers in the BPS survey are also less likely to be enrolled in IDR.

K-12 Education

Teacher Social Origins and Student Success: Effects of Teacher Race and Teacher Parental Education on Student Outcomes (In Progress)

In this project I use data on 8th graders and their English teachers from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) to examine whether teacher perceptions of student behavior differ by the social origins (racial/ethnic and educational attainment of parents) of the teacher. I find that teachers indeed have more positive perceptions of student behavior when they share racial/ethnic background or level of parental education with the student. Additionally, teachers whose parents have lower levels of education perceive students of color more positively than teachers whose parents have higher levels of education. Thus, I find that there is more equality in perceptions of students in the classrooms of teachers whose parents have lower levels of education (specifically, first generation college graduate teachers) such that students of any racial/ethnic group have similar probabilities of being perceived positively in these classrooms.