Making the Grade: Educational Stratification in the United States, 1925-1989
Author(s)
Hout, Michael; Raftery, Adrian E.; Bell, Eleanor O.
Abstract
Education and social stratification are closely linked, but the pattern of the relationship differs from one society and time period to another. In the United States, education is presumed to be integral to the American Dream of upward mobility. Secondary and higher education have expanded much faster than the school-age population, creating more equality in educational attainment by many measures. Yet it is widely believed that educational stratification remains important, perhaps in new forms that escape detection in standard analyses. The authors of this essay introduce, and apply to U.S. data, a framework that they call “maximally maintained inequality,” first developed in their studies of educational stratification in Ireland and Britain. This framework focuses attention on the long-term changes in the patterns of inequality in education, highlighting trends that do not show up in static analyses of experience at a single point time. The underlying idea is that existing patterns of inequality will tend to be preserved, regardless of whether educational opportunities are static or expanding. In the former case, the status quo in education will be maintained; in the latter case, higher-status groups will gain preferential access to new levels of education, and lower-status groups will follow only after everyone above them has had the opportunity to move up. This pattern might emerge from the rational choices of parents and students, if privileged groups are primarily interested in maximizing their own families’ education, not in the derivative goal of maintaining class differentials.
