Sociology of Education, Volume 98, Issue 1, Page 1-2, January 2025.

Sociology of Education, Ahead of Print.
This study draws on complete friendship network data on two first-year biological sciences cohorts at a selective university in the United States to investigate how and to what extent allocating students to curricular groups and grading their performance in class shape (1) processes of friend selection at the dyadic level and (2) friendship clustering at the network level. Through a set of stochastic actor-oriented models, results show that students tend to befriend peers from the same curricular group versus a different one (i.e., curricular group homophily) and befriend higher-performing peers (i.e., performance-based status). Follow-up analyses reveal that friendship clustering by curricular group placement is largely due to course co-enrollment (i.e., proximity), whereas academic-performance-based clustering is primarily the result of students aligning their own performance to match the average performance of their friends (i.e., influence). I discuss implications of these findings for helping to promote learning in higher education.

Sociology of Education, Ahead of Print.
Exclusionary discipline receives considerable scholarly attention, but the concept homogenizes practices that rely on the physical detainment of youth, such as in-school suspension, and practices that do not, such as out-of-school suspension. In this article, I argue that school discipline should be evaluated not only on the basis of whether it is exclusionary but also whether it is detainment-based. Whereas a practice such as in-school suspension relies on students’ physical detention, out-of-school suspension releases them from the school’s carceral control. I draw on three years of ethnographic observations and 108 interviews in a public high school to explore why and how students and adults differently evaluated detainment-based versus non-detainment-based practices. Although both groups drew parallels between detainment-based discipline and carcerality, adults insisted that detainment-based discipline was less “severe.” Students, however, strongly preferred non-detainment-based discipline because it released them to relative “freedom.” I explore the implications of these findings for both researchers and practitioners.

Sociology of Education, Volume 98, Issue 1, Page 44-61, January 2025.
Previous studies have shown that educational expectations of individuals with high socioeconomic status (SES) are relatively unaffected by low academic performance, a phenomenon called “sticky expectations.” However, this result might be biased by endogeneity and reverse causality between academic achievement and educational expectations. Using data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study from 11 countries with a strict school-entry rule and building on the well-established finding that children born in the months before the school-entry cutoff underperform at school, we use birth month as an instrument to identify the causal effect of early academic achievement on parents’ expectations of university completion by parental education. Our findings based on the instrumental variable (IV) regression show that the moderation of social origin in the relationship between children’s performance and parental expectations is moderately overestimated in cross-sectional data. Nonetheless, the stickiness of high-SES parental expectations is confirmed in the IV model, proving that parental expectations are less affected by children’s early achievement when the parents are highly educated.

Sociology of Education, Volume 98, Issue 1, Page 62-85, January 2025.
Does schooling equalize achievement disparities among students with and without a migrant background? This question remains largely unanswered in sociology. We hypothesized that children of migrants would benefit more from schooling, thereby making schools engines of educational integration. Our study tests this hypothesis in the context of German primary schooling using data from the National Educational Panel Study. We compared the achievements of students from native families and those with Western, non-Western (including Turkey), and former Soviet Union migrant backgrounds. Using the differential exposure approach, we decomposed learning into two causally distinct components: learning due to school exposure and learning due to being older at the time of testing. Our findings do not support the notion that schooling equalizes migrant–native achievement gaps. Instead, our results suggest that school exposure may widen the gap between the two largest groups of migrants in Germany, with students from the former Soviet Union disproportionally benefiting from school compared to other non-Western students. We conclude that German primary schools are not functioning as engines of educational integration because schooling does not reduce the migrant–native achievement gap and migrant groups with the greatest educational disadvantage benefit the least from schooling.

Sociology of Education, Volume 98, Issue 1, Page 3-26, January 2025.
This article investigates the racial and gender dynamics of educational inequality in suburban public schools in the United States during an era of rapid demographic change. As suburban schools transition from predominantly White enclaves to more diverse settings, it is unclear to what extent the popular narrative of “suburban advantage” holds for newcomers. Using a longitudinal data set of majority non-White, lower-income students (the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study), we explore how these students fare compared to urban counterparts during this transformative period. Our findings suggest that suburban schools are higher resourced than their urban counterparts, yet there are minimal urban–suburban differences in educational outcomes after accounting for individual and family characteristics. Furthermore, we reveal disparities in urban–suburban differences by race and gender. Our research challenges narratives that treat suburban institutions as monoliths and suggests the purported advantages of suburban schooling are not conferred uniformly to all students.

Sociology of Education, Volume 98, Issue 1, Page 27-43, January 2025.
Graduating from college is widely associated with social and personal advancement, yet many young graduates are not experiencing these benefits. Drawing on 127 interviews with college graduates in the United States and Spain who face employment precarity or economic instability, this study asks: How do these graduates understand their social positions and worth? How does the institution of higher education shape these understandings? The data demonstrate that respondents in both countries largely describe themselves as stalled or stuck. I argue that these are perceptions of “expectational liminality” stemming from the disjuncture between respondents’ expectations and their experiences as college graduates. In addition, I show how three narratives describing the professional/financial success, life course progression, and internal transformation expected of graduates shape respondents’ sense of expectational liminality. I discuss the effects of higher education on graduates’ self-perceptions in uncertain contexts and the relevance of expectational liminality to other contexts where there are disjunctures between expectations and reality.

Sociology of Education, Volume 97, Issue 4, Page 297-298, October 2024.

Sociology of Education, Volume 97, Issue 4, Page 299-315, October 2024.
Although undergraduates from all class backgrounds work while attending college, little is known about how students approach finding work and the benefits they reap from different on-campus roles. Drawing on interviews with 110 undergraduates at Harvard University, we show that in the absence of clear institutional expectations surrounding on-campus work opportunities, students draw on class-based strategies to determine which jobs are “right for them.” Upper-income students pursued “life of the mind” jobs that permitted them access to institutional resources and networks. Alternatively, lower-income students pursued more transactional “work for pay” positions that yielded fewer institutional benefits and connections. The consequences of these differential strategies were amplified during COVID-19 campus closures as work-for-pay positions were eliminated while life of the mind continued remotely. Through documenting heterogeneity in work experiences, we reveal a class-segregated labor market on campus and extend previous analyses of how university practices exacerbate class differences and reproduce inequality.

Sociology of Education, Volume 97, Issue 4, Page 316-341, October 2024.
Substantial social stratification research conceptualizes education as a series of standard transitions from one stage to the next, such as from high school to college. Yet less research examines mandatory transitions within each educational stage, which we call “intermediate educational transitions.” In this article, we examine a crucial intermediate transition in U.S. higher education, shifting from an undeclared to a declared major by major declaration deadlines, to provide a novel perspective on educational transitions. Bridging theoretical approaches from symbolic interactionism, social stratification, structural functionalism, and neo-institutionalism, we argue that successful major declaration transitions depend on students’ individual-level alignment between socially structured actions and culturally informed goals and organization-level alignment between organizational intentions and organizational actions. We use longitudinal interview data paired with 4.5 years of administrative records to assess this argument, finding that both individual- and organization-level alignment contribute to whether students experience seamless, stalled and restarted, or persistently stalled major declaration transitions. We further find that access to compensatory college organizational support determines whether stalled students can restart their major declaration trajectories. These findings indicate that colleges and universities can help to mitigate inequality in intermediate transitions by providing timely, high-quality support.

Sociology of Education, Volume 97, Issue 4, Page 342-362, October 2024.
This investigation examines the efficacy of multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA) over fixed-effects models when performing intersectional studies. The research questions are as follows: (1) What are typical strata representation rates and outcomes on physics research-based assessments? (2) To what extent do MAIHDA models create more accurate predicted strata outcomes than fixed-effects models? and (3) To what extent do MAIHDA models allow the modeling of smaller strata sample sizes? We simulated 3,000 data sets based on real-world data from 5,955 students on the LASSO platform. We found that MAIHDA created more accurate and precise predictions than fixed-effects models. We also found that using MAIHDA could allow researchers to disaggregate their data further, creating smaller group sample sizes while maintaining more accurate findings than fixed-effects models. We recommend using MAIHDA over fixed-effects models for intersectional investigations.

Sociology of Education, Volume 97, Issue 4, Page 363-383, October 2024.
This article investigates the understudied relationship between teacher socioeconomic status (SES) and retention. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and longitudinal data from 378 mathematics teachers, we use logistic regression to examine whether teacher SES, conceptualized and measured in terms of their economic, social, and cultural capital, is associated with their school, district, and professional retention at five years. We find teacher SES to be significantly related to retention at five years, and this is independent of teacher race. Practically, the study suggests that incorporating teacher SES into teacher recruitment and selection efforts, as has been done with teacher race, might be a valuable next step for schools and districts in which teacher retention has been a long-standing, serious issue.

Sociology of Education, Volume 97, Issue 4, Page 384-384, October 2024.