Two thoughtful yet troubling articles, published within a week of each other, startled higher education leaders last week. In the great debate about which factors best explain the growing achievement gaps between rich and poor students, these studies reached important conclusions about the “drivers” contributing to the widening disparities.
Isabel Sawhill, writing for the series “Social Mobility Memos,” published by the Brookings Institution, said that “the rungs are only widening in terms of income inequality. There are growing class-related gaps in family structure, parenting styles, school test scores, college attendance and graduation, and neighborhood conditions.” Drawing from a series of scissor charts in Robert Putnam’s book, Our Kids, Sawhill concluded, “whatever the gaps in an earlier generation between kids from more or less advantaged families, they are much wider now.”
Sawmill’s solution is to invest in evidence-based programs, creating a continuum from before birth through college graduation. These include effective home-visiting programs, high-quality Pre-K, and comprehensive school reforms in elementary and high school. She argues that her experience working with the Social Genome Model “suggests that if these programs were taken to scale, one might get a substantial boost to social mobility.”
Writing in The New York Times, Susan Dynarski concludes that the graduation gap is even wider than the enrollment gap. She based her findings on a study that tracked a cohort of 15,000 high school sophomores begun in 2002 by the National Center for Education Statistics. This study divided the students into four quartiles based on parents’ education, income and occupation. These sophomores were optimistic overall, with more than 70 percent of them planning on earning a bachelor’s degree.
Further, 87 percent in the top quartile expected to get a bachelor’s degree, with 24 percent planning to also earn an advanced degree. In the bottom quartile, 58 percent of the students expected to get at least a bachelor’s degree and 12 percent planned to go on to graduate school.
The study looked at what happened to these 15,000 sophomores in 2015. Dynarski reports that, “among participants from the most disadvantaged families, just 14 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree.” Put another way, “one out of four of the disadvantaged students who had hoped to get a bachelor’s had done so.” Among students from the most advantaged families, however, “60 percent earned a bachelor’s, about two-thirds of those who planned to.”
The study then tracked sophomores through a battery of math and reading tests to determine whether the most disadvantaged students were simply overconfident with their dreams “outstripping their academic skills.” The finding is telling: “educational achievement does not explain the gap in bachelor’s degree attainment.”
