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Mentorship programs for adolescents have become increasingly popular, and they boast a wide variety of positive results for the young people involved, including increased educational achievement and attainment. In many ways, however, the keys to their success are still a mystery. Few large-scale studies, for instance, have examined if some approaches to mentor-mentee matching are more beneficial than others, and theories that might be used to guide the pairing of mentors and mentees seem to offer conflicting advice. In short, mentoring programs may be popular, but there is little theoretical or empirical evidence to help us understand the factors that lead to successful matches.In this paper, I review existing studies of mentoring to highlight what we know about successful mentoring relationships. I pay special attention to race-matching and how it may influence the educational attainment of mentees. Then I present a theoretically and empirically grounded model of mentoring relationships and describe how the model will be tested using data from the Big Brothers/Big Sisters (BBBS) program. This paper will build on existing research in an attempt to more fully understand the impact of mentor influence. The BBBS dataset will be used to re-test previous findings of the importance of race-matched mentors and determine if they have a more positive impact than non-matched mentors. I will then examine if the educational attainment of mentors has any impact on the educational attainment of their mentees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In earlier work the peer cultures of U.S. high schools were analyzed using a general theory of status relationships to explain the observed patterns. This paper reports on a study of peer cultures and status differences in secondary schools in Delhi and Shillong, India and compares these to U.S. schools. Significant variations are found in these three settings. In important respects Indian schools exhibit more equality than U.S. schools. An explanation of these differences is proposed drawing on a general theory of stratus relations and showing how the tendencies it identifies are modified by key cultural characteristics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescents' expectations of earning a college degree have become increasingly widespread, but for many such expectations will not be realized. This paper examines trends in how expectations persist or change in young adulthood, and asks whether persistent plans for a college degree in lieu of attainment are on the rise and how such plans are socially patterned. Panel data on 15 consecutive classes of high school seniors show that a growing percent of young adults persist in their plans to get a college degree even if none had been obtained by their early 30s. Persistence was more common among racial/ethnic minorities and among students with greater levels of college-going resources in the form of college-educated parents, a college preparatory high school program, and above average past grades. Overall, though, this was a rare pathway. The greatest changes were a drop in never expecting a college degree and an increase in successfully realizing plans to earn one. Cooling out or warming up expectations were fairly uncommon pathways and did not exhibit much change across cohorts. We also present evidence of cohort changes in the influence of gender and family/academic background on the probability of fulfilling college degree expectations versus other pathways. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A well-developed, influential literature has studied gender from the perspective of practice, but less scholarship has employed this perspective in the study of race and social class. This paper applies the theory of practice to race and class through an analysis of teenagers at a predominately low-income rural high school. Based on one and a half years of observation and in-depth interviews with students at the school, I examine how students developed understandings of race and class and demonstrate how class constructions shaped perceptions and enactments of whiteness. I focus on prominent class-based categories in this context such as "redneck," "prep," and the distinctively local concept "rutter." Although the school's student body was ninety-eight percent white, I show how these class categories emerged from and contributed to racial understandings and practices. I conclude by discussing how race and class concepts are produced through micro level interaction and how this production furthers inequalities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an influential body of work extending across more than three decades and drawing on data from the United States, Poland, Japan, and the Ukraine, Melvin Kohn, Carmi Schooler, and their associates have found that cognitive capacities are affected by experiences on the job, specifically that working at a complex job improves cognitive functioning. These findings anticipate and parallel recent research on the relationships among social integration, leisure-time activities, and cognitive functioning among the elderly. This paper tests the Kohn-Schooler hypothesis using different measures, models, and data. Specifically, we estimate models of the reciprocal influence of work complexity and cognitive functioning at ages 53-54 among women and men who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. Even when adolescent academic ability test scores and high school rank have been controlled, we find moderate effects of the complexity of work on abstract reasoning ability at ages 53-54, and these effects are robust to reasonable assumptions about the unreliability of measurement of adolescent academic ability. Moreover, the effects of work complexity on abstract reasoning ability are virtually the same among women and men. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on multiracial youth and adolescents has primarily focused on their racial identity formation. Few studies have examined the impact of multiracial identity on socioeconomic outcomes. Using the National Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine how multiracials differ from monoracials in their attachment to school and whether they report similar educational achievement relative to their monoracial counterparts. We find that with respect to school outcomes, most multiracial groups occupy an "in-between" status relative to their monoracial counterparts. However, mixed minorities (multiracials who have no white ancestry) are especially disadvantaged with respect to their attachment to school and their GPA compared to white multiracials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary societies, adolescents' individuation is largely staged within the educational system, and is defined by several schooling options. This is particularly true when young people reach upper secondary education, as this transition implies the definition of a personal project. In the Portuguese context, authenticity is linked to the "obligation" of choosing - by means of a compulsory vocational choice. However, a significant part of this process occurs in a particular period of time - adolescence - generally characterized by the adhesion to exploration ethics and the building up of a doubtful self. Furthermore, exercising autonomy frequently confronts individuals with the experience of uncertainty, which may be seen as a major consequence of living in a world made of multiple choices. To define a personal project that gives studies a meaning thus becomes a problem pupils have to deal with. Supported on empirical data based on in-depth interviews to pupils attending upper secondary education in Portuguese public schools, this article discusses some of these issues. Specially, we intend to explore pupils' obligation to exhibit their autonomy by choosing a school path with the experience of (un)certainties and the awareness of risks that may emerge along with their options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]