Different Paths , Different Destinations : A Life Course Perspective on Educational Transitions

BACKGROUND While the proportion of high school graduates who continue on to postsecondary education has increased, rates of bachelor’s degree completion have remained steady over the past three decades (Adelman, 2004). Thus, the policy issue at hand is not only access, but persistence in post-secondary education. To understand persistence, it is key to carefully examine the different paths students follow through secondary and post-secondary education. Indeed, research shows that the “traditional” pathway to earn a bachelor’s degree has become the exception rather than the rule, and that deviating from this “traditional” route dramatically decreases students’ likelihood of completing a bachelor’s degree (Horn & Carroll, 1996; Carroll, 1989). A “traditional” pathway usually refers to entry into college immediately after the conferral of a high school diploma, full-time attendance at a four-year post-secondary institution, and continuous enrollment until graduation. Thus, students can deviate from the “traditional” pathway in a variety of ways: completing high school by alternative routes such as the General Educational Development (GED) certification, delaying entry into college, interrupting college enrollment once or more, and attending a post-secondary institution with an “open door” admission policy (Hearn, 1992; Dougherty, 1994; Jacobs & King, 2002; Horn et al., 2002; Bradburn & Carroll, 2002; Smith, 2003). Current research tends to study how each of these events, in isolation, affect students’ educational attainment. In this dissertation, I integrate all these events to focus on students’ trajectories through secondary and post-secondary education. I am concerned with the impact that different trajectories have on inequality of educational attainment, and in particular on the rates of bachelor’s degree completion by different socioeconomic groups. RESEARCH QUESTIONS In this dissertation I pose three sets of research questions: (1) What proportion of students follow “traditional” and “non-traditional” pathways in their secondary and post-secondary education? How do the trajectories that student follow to attain a post-secondary degree vary in terms of type, sequence, and timing? (2) How does students’ socioeconomic background (SES) affect the different pathways they pursue through secondary and post-secondary education? (3) How do cognitive and non-cognitive skills affect students’ pathways? Does the inclusion of these skills in the model reduce the previously unmeasured heterogeneity? CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD By addressing these research questions, I seek to fill three gaps in the literature. First, a proper analysis of educational pathways requires consideration of three factors: the type of educational experiences individuals have, the timing at which different transitions occur, and the sequence of events within educational levels. However, the standard sociological conceptualization of educational attainment, the educational transitions (ET) model, ignores these three issues both theoretically and empirically (e.g. Mare, 1980; Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993). Type, timing, and sequence are relevant for educational stratification because research indicates that deviating from the “traditional” pathway in each of these dimensions reduces students’ likelihood of post-secondary enrollment and degree completion. By examining the role these three dimensions play on educational trajectories, this dissertation addresses crucial aspects of inequality in educational attainment. Second, given that the ET model ignores the current diversity of educational trajectories, further research is required to re-examine the effect of SES on educational attainment. Focusing exclusively on “traditional” trajectories, the ET model consistently shows that the effect of SES weakens as individuals progress through each consecutive educational stage (e.g. SES more strongly affects the completion of high school than college, given that students completed the immediately previous level of schooling). This dissertation assesses whether this pattern of declining SES effects holds for students who follow “non-traditional” pathways. It is well documented that on average, these students have lower SES than their “traditional” counterparts (Hearn, 1992; Goldrick-Rab, forthcoming). However, research indicates that among students who deviate from a “traditional” trajectory, those who complete a post-secondary