This article explores the factors that determine how high school graduates become linked to colleges at particular levels of selectivity. First, it assesses various theories of change in educational ...attainment by comparing patterns of access to institutions of higher education of varying selectivity in the United States between 1980 and 1992. Second, with regard to how students and colleges of varying selectivity are matched, it replicates the work of James C. Hearn on 1980 high school graduates ( Using "High School and Beyond") and introduces some additional variables, drawn primarily from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in an analysis of 1992 high school graduates (using the "National Education Longitudinal Study). (DIPF/Orig.)
Brilliant. - TimeAdmirable, rigorous. De Waal is a wise and patient reporter. - The New York Review of BooksNever have all the twists and turns, sad carnage, and bullheadedness on all side been ...better described - or indeed, better explained...Offers a deeper and more compelling account of the conflict than anyone before. - Foreign AffairsSince its publication in 2003, the first edition of Black Garden has become the definitive study of how Armenia and Azerbaijan, two southern Soviet republics, were pulled into a conflict that helped bring them to independence, spell the end the Soviet Union, and plunge a region of great strategic importance into a decade of turmoil. This important volume is both a careful reconstruction of the history of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict since 1988 and on-the-spot reporting of the convoluted aftermath. Part contemporary history, part travel book, part political analysis, the book is based on six months traveling through the south Caucasus, more than 120 original interviews in the region, Moscow, and Washington, and unique historical primary sources, such as Politburo archives. The historical chapters trace how the conflict lay unresolved in the Soviet era; how Armenian and Azerbaijani societies unfroze it; how the Politiburo failed to cope with the crisis; how the war was fought and ended; how the international community failed to sort out the conflict. What emerges is a complex and subtle portrait of a beautiful and fascinating region, blighted by historical prejudice and conflict. The revisedand updated 10th-year anniversary edition includes a new forward, a new chapter covering developments up to-2011, such as the election of new presidents in both countries, Azerbaijan's oil boom and the new arms race in the region, and a new conclusion, analysing the reasons for the intractability of the conflict and whether there are any prospects for its resolution. Telling the story of the first conflict to shake Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union, Black Garden remains a central account of the reality of the post-Soviet world.Thomas de Waalhas reported on Russia and the Caucasus since 1993 for theMoscow Times,The Times of London,The Economist, and theBBC World Service. He is currently Senior Associate, Caucasus at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His publications include, most recently,The Caucasus: An Introduction(Oxford University Press).
Using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), we analyze how educational aspirations are formed and maintained from eighth to twelfth grades among a single cohort of youth. ...Guided by research in the status-attainment literature, which focuses on how aspirations are shaped, and the blocked-opportunities framework, which considers the structural obstacles that bound or level aspirations, we find that the relative shares of minority youth who have high educational aspirations are high from eighth to twelfth grades. However, ethnic groups differ in the extent to which high educational aspirations are maintained such that black and Hispanic youth have less stable aspirations. Our results suggest that family socioeconomic status (SES) not only contributes to ambitious aspirations in eighth grade but, more important, to the maintenance of high aspirations throughout the high school years. Because black and Hispanic students are less likely to maintain their high aspirations throughout high school, owing to their lower family SES background, we argue that their early aspirations are less concrete than those of white and especially Asian students. Focus-group discussions with adolescents support quantitative findings that, compared to whites and Asians, black and Hispanic youth are relatively uninformed about college, thus dampening their odds of reaching their educational goals.
Our purpose is to document convergences and divergences in the mode of institutional regulation of the education systems in five European countries (Belgium, England, France, Hungary and Portugal). ...On the national level, partially convergent policies create, to varying degrees and with different temporal rhythms, variants of a post-bureaucratic regulation regime which seeks to go beyond the bureaucratic-professional model which remains dominant today, by highlighting either the traits of an 'evaluative state' or those of the 'quasi-market' model. However, beyond the influence of these transnational models, path dependencies also exist and, in addition, we witness hybridization of these models with institutional, political and/or ideological constraints specific to each country.
