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There are large inequalities in who enrolls in four-year collegiate programs, who finishes, and why. In this article, we draw on several waves of the Educational Longitudinal Study, explore family disadvantages, and uniquely highlight challenges first-generation students face. Family resources, cultural capital, and college-focused parental actions and their consequences for high school achievement explain most of the college attendance disadvantage. Inequalities in college completion, however, are notably also explained by disparate stressors, the need to work, and limited social/curricular integration while in college. We discuss these patterns and what they reveal about inequality and the limitations of contemporary college access.

The debate over whether educational spending shapes achievement has persisted for decades, largely because of methodological and analytical limitations associated with the use of districtlevel data. In this study, the authors analyzed unique within-district variations in spending and achievement among 89 public elementary schools in a large, North Central, urban district. The analyses reveal considerable disparities in spending within the district, which are linked to local patterns of racial and class stratification and concentration. They show how these locally driven inequalities and their links to specific school resources have consequences for achievement in five distinct subject areas. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their findings for understanding the local production of class and racial educational inequality and recent moves toward resegregation that are evident in many U.S. cities. D espite decades of research and public policy debates on the topic, it is still unclear whether educational spending influences students' achievement. Some studies have suggested that there are no apparent effects of spending, while others have found that educational dollars indeed make a difference (see Burtless 1996). These debates and the research from which they have drawn have been limited for several reasons, not the least of which is the reliance on district-level data on spending (Farland 1997; Picus 1997). In this article, we extend the literature on educational spending and achievement by presenting our study, which analyzed the extent of variation in spending, its potential causes, and its consequences for students' achievement across 89 elementary schools within one urban school district. These unique, within-district, school-level data allowed us to delineate (1) significant withindistrict inequality in spending and its consequences for achievement; (2) the extent to which the disparities are associated with larger patterns of racial and class inequality and concentration; and (3) how spending matters, that is, the mechanisms that mediate the link between spending and achievement. We conclude this article by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the dynamics of local stratification, school inequality, and depressed patterns of achievement that are evident in many urban areas of the United States.

Collective action rests, in part, on group identity and political opportunity. Just how group identity is manifested and perceptions of political opportunity are altered, however, remain unclear, particularly in the case of a geographically dispersed population. An often overlooked mechanism is media technology. This article analyzes an important yet underexamined instance of worker mobilization in the United States: the southern textile strike campaigns of 1929 to 1934 during which more than 400,000 workers walked off their jobs. Using historical data on textile manufacturing concentration and strike activity, FCC data on radio station foundings, and analyses of political content and song lyrics, the authors show that the geographic proximity of radio stations to the textile belt and the messages aired shaped workers' sense of collective experience and political opportunity: Walk-outs and strike spillover across mill towns resulted. The implications of the analyses for social movement theory generally, and for the understanding of how media can enable or constrain collective struggle, are discussed.

Theories of cultural capital and family educational resources explain how and why background matters for achievement, yet it is unclear whether the processes described are equally applicable to nonwhites. The study presented here examined (1) the extent to which black and white students differ in cultural capital and educational resources, (2) the mediating role these attributes may play between family background and racial disparities in achievement, and (3) whether educational returns vary by racial group. The findings suggest that significant racial variations in cultural capital and household educational items are largely a function of disparities in family socioeconomic status, but that these resources have only a small mediating effect on the gap in black-white achievement. Black and low-SES students tend to receive less educational return, probably because of micropolitical evaluative processes at the school and classroom levels

1. The institutional embededness of the stratification process: a comparative study of qualifications and occupations in thirteen countries 2. The transition from school to work in Australia 3. Education and occupation in Britain 4. From education to first job: the French case 6. Investment in education: educational qualifications and class of entry in the Republic of Ireland 7. The transition from school to work in Israel 8. Occupational returns to education in contemporary Italy 9. Educational credentials and labour market entry outcomes in Japan 10. From high school and college to work in Japan - meritocracy through institutional and semi-institutional linkages 11. Education and early occupation in the Netherlands around 1990: categorical and continous scales and the details of a relationship 12. Allocation processes in the Swedish labour market 13. The transition from school to work in Switzerland: do characteristics of the educational system and class barriers matter? 14. The transition from school to work in Taiwan 15. The early returns: the transition from school to work in the United States

Les AA. montrent que les inegalites economiques entre blancs et afro-americains tendent a croitre aux Etats-Unis. Ils soulignent toutefois que leur intensite varie en fonction des regions. Ils estiment que les differences liees au capital humain refletent avec une plus grande acuite ces inegalites et que celles-ci sont determinees par la competition economique et politique. Ils s'interessent plus particulierement a la situation des populations noires dans le sud des Etats-Unis. Ils presentent un certain nombre de donnees collectees en Caroline du Nord en 1980

This book deals with a subject of profound importance to understanding the place of the modern corporation in a democratic society. This is the inherent conflicts between the interest of corporate owners (the shareholders), the interest of the larger society, and the interest of the managers who run the corporations. Managers have created a shared professional ideology that is designed to preserve their autonomy. To protect itself from unbridled corporate power, government has enacted a myriad regulations to check this power. The book describes how, in different eras the balance between corporate power and government regulation has changed with the interests of society as a whole. The authors conclude by looking at the impact of collective investor action--especially institutional investors--on the efforts by managers to preserve their autonomy.