Tag: poverty

Higher education and social mobility


There is an appalling level of inequality in American society; and even more troubling, the multiple dimensions of inequality seem to reinforce each other, with the result that disadvantaged groups remain disadvantaged across multiple generations. We can ask two different kinds of sociological questions about these facts: What factors cause the reproduction of disadvantage over multiple generations? And what policy interventions have some effect on enhancing upward social mobility within disadvantaged groups? How can we change this cycle of disadvantage?

Several earlier postings have addressed some aspects of the causal question (post, post). Here I’d like to consider the policy question — and the question of how we can use empirical evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of large policy initiatives on social outcomes such as mobility.

One social policy in particular seems to have a lot of antecedent plausibility: a policy aimed at increasing the accessibility of higher education to the disadvantaged group. The theory is that individuals within the group will benefit from higher education by enhancing their skills and knowledge; this will give them new economic opportunities and access to higher-wage jobs; the individuals will do better economically, and their children will begin life with more economic support and a set of values that encourage education. So access to higher education ought to prove to be a virtuous circle or a positive feedback loop, leading to substantial social mobility in currently disadvantaged groups.

It is a plausible theory; but are there empirical methods through which we can evaluate whether it actually works this way?

Paul Attewell and David Lavin undertake to do exactly that in Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?, published in 2007. Their research consists of a survey study of a cohort of poor women who were admitted to the City University of New York between 1970 and 1972 under an open-admissions policy. Thirty years later Attewell and Lavin surveyed a sample of the women in this group (about 2,000 women), gathering data about their eventual educational attainment, their income, and the educational successes of their children. Analysis of their data permitted them to demonstrate that attenders were likely to enjoy higher income than non-attenders and to have children who valued education at levels that were higher than the children of non-attenders.

The benefits of higher education in increasing personal income were significant; they find that in the population surveyed in 2000, the high school graduate earned $30,000, women with some college earned $35,000, women with the associate’s degree earned $40,783, women with the bachelor’s degree earned $42,063, and women with a postgraduate degree earned $54,545. In other words, there was a fairly regular progression in income associated with each further step in the higher education credential achieved. And they found — contrary to conservative critics of open-access programs in higher education — that these women demonstrated eventual completion rates that were substantially higher than 4-6 year graduation rates would indicate — over 70% earned some kind of degree (table 2.2). “Our long-range perspective shows that disadvantaged women ultimately complete college degrees in far greater numbers than scholars realize” (4).

So access to higher education works, according to the evidence uncovered in this study: increasing access to post-secondary education is the causal factor, and improved economic and educational outcomes are the effect.

This is an important empirical study that sets out some of the facts that pertain to poverty and higher education. The study provides empirical confirmation for the idea that affordable and accessible mass education works: when programs are available that permit poor people to gain access to higher education, their future earnings and the future educational success of their children are both enhanced. It’s a logical conclusion — but one that has been challenged by conservative critics such as Bill Bennett. And given the increasing financial stress that public universities are currently experiencing due to declining state support for higher education, it is very important for policy makers to have a clear understanding of the return that is likely on the investment in affordable access to higher education.

Knowing poverty


Poverty is an important social fact in virtually every society. What is involved in knowing about poverty — for the citizen, for the poor person, for the social scientist, the historian, and the novelist?

To start, there is a set of descriptive and analytical features of poverty. How do we define the concept of being poor: is it a specific income level in a specific country or region; is it a specific level of deprivation in terms of access to a defined set of basic goods; is it a threshold level of resources necessary to actualize one’s capabilities?

And then we want to know the facts about the disribution of poor people, geographically and demographically. What is the percentage of poor people in urban locations? How much rural poverty is there? How do poverty rates compare across major social groups (race, age, marital status)? And how have these statistics changed over time? We could imagine presenting this body of knowledge as a compact set of dynamic maps and graphs, representing the large body of data in terms of a series of displays over time and space — for example, CensusScope. (Edward Tufte’s work comes to mind here — visit his website and an early, direction-setting book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition.)

Parallel to this factual and statistical knowledge about the distribution of poverty over a population is the sociological question, what are the social mechanisms that give rise to these patterns and trends? What kinds of factors cause some populations to have a persistent and high rate of poverty, while other populations experience much lower rates?

Another and distinct aspect of “knowing poverty” has to do with getting to the experience of being poor. This is partly a question for ethnography — how do poor people struggle and cope?How do they experience their daily lives? And how do they express their experiences? But it is also an attempt to gain a clearer grasp of the situation of being poor — what it means for everyday nutrition, how it affects options when illness or accident arises. Sociologists with an ear for qualitative investigation and conversation have bee able to capture a lot of this (Sennett and Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class; Richard Sennett, The Craftsman.) So making an effort to gain an understanding of the situation and experience of being poor is an important aspect of knowing poverty.

And how are non-poor people able to gain some knowledge of the situation and experience of being poor? This is where the knowledge of literature comes in; through the ability of the poet or fiction writer to vividly and accurately capture something of the lives and thoughts of people in very different circumstances than one’s own. This is an important aspect of a multicultural pedagogy: finding materials that permit students to immerse themselves in the texture of other people’s experiences of the world.

Now, finally, citizens. Poverty, it seems, is largely invisible to middle class people in the United States. Their knowledge of the basic facts and insights mentioned above is extremely limited. Here the problem isn’t research or pedagogy. It is clear enough how the Detroit Free Press or the Atlanta Constitution could present the basic facts about national or regional poverty on a clear and understandable form. Instead, the problem seems to be a cognitive version of myopia. The social circumstances that confront us up close, and that are likely to influence our basic interests, get our focused attention. But all too often, more distant social problems don’t get a second look. And this seems all too often to be the case for poverty.