Perverse Openness or Virtuous Cycle? The Future and Racial and Ethnic Educational Stratification

Eric Grodsky

Some recent work in sociology suggests that the effects of race/ethnicity on educational attainment are largely attributable to socioeconomic status and will therefore continue to wane as the minority middle class increases in size. This forecast implicitly assumes that youth benefit uniformly from their parents’ socioeconomic achievements. In the proposed research, I empirically test this assumption by exploring the high school achievements, college enrollments and degree attainments of youth from the high school classes of 1972, 1982 and 1992. I hypothesize that Latino and African American students are less adversely affected than white students by poor or working class origins, but also less advantaged that white students by middle or upper class origins, and that race/ethnic difference in educational attainment remain relatively constant over this period. I discuss the implications of these hypotheses for our understanding of social stratification and for affirmative action policies. By looking at the interaction between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status in the educational attainment process, this project will inform our understanding of the likely future of racial and ethnic educational stratification and the implications of substituting class-based for race-based affirmative action programs.

About Eric Grodsky

After graduating from Kenyon College in 1991, I returned to Washington, D.C., where I spent the next two years working for Pelavin Associates, a consulting company engaged primarily in educational research. An interest in educational policy, coupled with a growing appreciation of the role of education in social stratification, led me to pursue a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. I continued to be involved in discussion of educational policy while studying at Wisconsin, working with members of the Madison Metropolitan School District school board, and became more interested in understanding inequality outside of the K-12 years, in preschool and postsecondary education. I wrote about inequality in access to different types of college in my dissertation, and since joining the department of sociology at the University of California—Davis in 2002, have continued to explore the dimensions of social stratification in higher education.