Steven Alvarado, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, will deliver our third LCDS seminar of Michaelmas Term on Wednesday 22nd October, 3:15-4:30pm, in the Butler Room at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
He will speak on the topic: Success by Address: Childhood Neighborhood Disadvantage and College Enrollment Across Demographic Cohorts
Abstract
Over the past four decades, the United States has experienced two major transformations in housing and education. First, residential income segregation has risen sharply, particularly among families with children. Second, post-secondary enrolment has expanded substantially, driven in part by the growing wage premium for university-educated workers. As these two long-term trends have unfolded side by side, an important question has emerged: are families strategically competing for neighbourhoods that best position their children for success in the “university game”? And if so, are they increasingly concentrating geo-spatial opportunities to secure socio-economic advantages for the next generation?
To explore these questions, Steven Alvarado analyses three successive cohorts of restricted data on students entering university in the early 1980s, mid-2000s, and late 2010s. Drawing on federally restricted geo-coded data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and transcript data from the National Center for Education Statistics, he traces students from childhood through young adulthood. His findings reveal that the neighbourhoods where students grow up exert an increasingly powerful and unequal influence on their university enrolment and selectivity outcomes across cohorts. Steven concludes by discussing the implications of these widening neighbourhood effects, suggesting that intensified housing competition among families may further constrain equitable access to higher education and perpetuate future economic inequality.
About the Speaker
Steven Alvarado is an Associate Professor of Sociology and a faculty fellow at the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity, the Institute for Latino Studies, the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, Notre Dame Population Analytics, and the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame.