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ON THE EDGE OF COMMITMENT

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Tables and Figures.............................................................................................................xAcknowledgments........................................................................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTIONChapter One Why Do We Need a New Model of Educational Attainment?.....................................................................3COMING TO TERMS WITH THE SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE ON EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENTChapter Two Expectation Formation and the Status Socialization Theory of Educational Attainment.......................................35Chapter Three Do Beliefs Matter? A Reanalysis of the Relationship Between Educational Expectations and Attainment.....................57A COMMITMENT-BASED MODEL OF EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENTChapter Four The Generation of Preparatory Commitment from Forward-Looking Beliefs....................................................99Chapter Five The Evolution of the Beliefs That Determine Commitment...................................................................139Chapter Six Incorporating Imitative and Normative Sources of Commitment...............................................................175Chapter Seven A New Agenda for the Sociology of Educational Attainment................................................................207References.............................................................................................................................219Index..................................................................................................................................233

Chapter One

Explanations for patterns of social inequality are only as strong as the models of educational attainment on which they depend. Educational training creates and then uniquely signals many of the skills and habits that determine styles of life and economic well-being. Educational credentials and the social connections they embody facilitate the allocation of individuals to alternative occupational and labor market positions. No convincing causal model of intergenerational mobility can be fashioned without incorporating these mechanisms.

Shifting from one depiction of the structure of inequality to another does not relieve the burden of having to account for differences in educational attainment. Class schemas, prestige hierarchies, and labor markets are similarly incomprehensible without an explanation of how the distribution of educational attainment emerges. Even explanations for patterns of ascriptive inequality are crucially reliant on foundational models of educational processes. The extent of racial and gender discrimination in the labor market, for example, cannot be assessed without taking a position on how and why individuals accumulate alternative educational credentials and skills.

This justification for rigorous modeling of educational attainment, on which generations of social stratification researchers and sociologists of education have relied, is even more compelling now. Over the past three decades, the evolution of postindustrial society has increased the stakes for comprehensively modeling patterns of educational attainment, as these now more strongly predict economic well-being. Between 1979 and 1999, the real wages of high school graduates decreased by 8.9 percent, whereas the real wages of college graduates and advanced degree graduates increased by 13.0 and 18.9 percent, respectively (Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt 2001: 153). By the late 1990s, levels of labor market inequality in the United States reached levels more extreme even than those observed in the 1930s. And therefore, as educational attainment becomes a stronger predictor of lifetime well-being, understanding why some adolescents carry on to postsecondary education and others do not has become increasingly important.

Unfortunately, it is also becoming clear that current models of educational attainment are insufficiently complete. Consider the capacity to determine the consequences of the growth in labor market inequality for patterns of educational attainment. Over the same time period, policies designed to increase college enrollments have changed only modestly. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, it can be argued that increases in labor market inequality should have variable effects on different groups of prospective college students. The increasing incentives for obtaining college degrees should prompt more students to enter college, but the rate of increase in college enrollments should differ by social background. One would expect the increase to be less pronounced for prospective students from relatively disadvantaged social origins, for these students' relative access to liquid funds to finance a college education has declined as inequality has grown.

Explanatory models of educational attainment in the social sciences are unable to determine whether this prediction is accurate, to say nothing of the underlying mechanism that supposedly generates it. None of the established models, I will argue in this book, can be used to determine whether or not students' beliefs about their future prospects are responsive to changes in incentives, and, if so, how changes in beliefs affect the long sequence of commitment decisions that determine a student's final level of educational attainment. The main goal of this book is to develop the foundation for a new and better model of educational attainment, one that can generate sufficiently complete explanations by specifying and modeling the belief-based mechanisms that have been assumed away in the past.

Before proceeding to development of the model, in this introductory chapter I present the basic facts on college entry and college completion in the United States. I then demarcate the limits of current knowledge and develop two sets of reasons why the social sciences need a new and better model of educational attainment-to resolve empirical puzzles and to guide better policy development and evaluation. I then discuss why sociology as a discipline is well prepared to produce and embrace a new model, and I conclude by justifying the mode of theoretical development that I will pursue in subsequent chapters.

THE BASIC FACTS ON EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

Who goes to college, and who graduates? Table 1.1 presents the college entry and graduation patterns of the high school classes of 1982 and 1992, as of 1990 and 2000, respectively. The findings are based on parallel analyses of the two most widely used national surveys sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the High School & Beyond Survey (HS&B) and the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) (U.S. Department of Education 1995, 2002).

In the first column of each panel, the college entry patterns of high school graduates are presented separately for the four largest racial/ethnic groups in the two surveys. For example, for white students of the class of 1982, 53.84 percent of students entered college within one year of graduating from high school, 18.10 percent entered college more than one year after graduating from high school, and the remaining 28.07 percent never entered college (as of 1990,...