Author Archives: legallysociable

94% of American parents expect their kid to go to college

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Looking at the article “Is a college education worth the price?“, I was pointed to Pew survey data released in May 2011 about what Americans think about college. Among the findings:

Nearly every parent surveyed (94%) says they expect their child to attend college, but even as college enrollments have reached record levels, most young adults in this country still do not attend a four-year college. The main barrier is financial. Among adults ages 18 to 34 who are not in school and do not have a bachelor’s degree, two-thirds say a major reason for not continuing their education is the need to support a family. Also, 57% say they would prefer to work and make money; and 48% say they can’t afford to go to college.

These are pretty high aspirations that cut across income levels and backgrounds. Pew suggests the primary barrier to reaching these expectations is money: the need to support oneself and a family gets in the way.

But I wonder if there is another barrier that is partly due to finances and partly due to other factors: it can be difficult to translate aspirations into outcomes. In today’s world and particularly in America where parents have always desired great things for their children (I remember this coming out distinctly in the original Middletown study), what parent wouldn’t say that their kid will attend college? If one comes from a privileged background, a child can see how this path will logically play out: you go through the stages of school and naturally you will move from high school to college (with finances somehow being taken care of and parents socking away money for over a decade in a college fund). But, in lesser circumstances, where is this easy path? It may be doable but there are a lot of obstacles standing in the way.

This reminds me of Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods. While I can’t remember whether she specifically talks about college aspirations, the class-based styles of parenting she outlines could lead to different outcomes in achieving these parental aspirations.

A sociologist against the idea of closure

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Via BigThink.com, I stumbled across a sociologist making an interesting argument: “closure” is a cultural construction. This sounds both controversial and fascinating as it draws attention to a topic that we don’t think much about: how to grieve and deal with loss as individuals and, perhaps more interesting for sociologists, as a culture.

Two quick thoughts:
1. I would guess Berns argues that closure is more of a cultural development than an actual experience a person has and is emblematic of a therapeutic American culture that emphasizes “moving on.” But I’ll have to read the book to find out. Developing personal or collective memories about traumatic events can be interesting topics to study, as the growing field of the sociology of disasters illustrates.

2. Looking at the blog that accompanies the book, I wonder how much demand Berns will be in with the upcoming September 11th memorials. On one hand, some could find her take on grief to be reassuring and needed. On the other hand, some might be angry. If she does become part of the media circus surrounding the commemorative, I hope she can push a sociological perspective on the proceedings.

International Furnishings and Design Association survey also suggests McMansions are on the way out

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A number of commentators have suggested the era of McMansions is over. A new survey of the American members of the International Furnishings and Design Association agrees with this prediction. Here are some of the findings:

-Americans will be living in smaller spaces with fewer rooms by the year 2020, say more than 76% of IFDA members. Eleven years ago, only 49% foresaw less living space in our future…

-Separate rooms are disappearing; they are blending into spaces that serve many different purposes, believe 91.5% of the design experts – which is exactly what they foresaw back in 2000.

-Furniture also is going multipurpose, say 67.5% of the the IFDA forecasters. They see modular, moveable, and smaller-scaled furniture overtaking built-ins and big pieces. There will be more interest in ergonomic designs – designed to fit the human body – but almost none in furniture designed to be disposable…

-Everyone’s working at home. A home office is a given, say more than three-quarters of the respondents, but here’s the news: Nearly 40% of the forecasters see more than one home office under every roof…

In summary: leaders in the furnishings and design field think that Americans will be living in smaller, more multipurpose spaces.

Several questions regarding these survey findings:
1. How much do those surveyed get to set and sell these product changes in the years to come?
2. If the economy improves dramatically in the next few years, are all these predictions moot?
3. How long before these predictions and ideas become the norm set before average Americans in places like furniture showrooms or on HGTV?
4. What do you do with previous findings of the survey?
a. For example, in 2000, roughly half surveyed thought Americans would be living in smaller spaces. The actual Census numbers about new single-family homes: on average, they were 2,266 square feet, 2,438 square feet in 2009, and 2,392 square feet in 2010. This is still a net gain over most of the decade with a dip between 2008 and 2010. So half of those surveyed in 2000 were wrong?
b. The predictions about the drop in separate rooms were the same now as in 2000. Were they right?
c. If those surveyed can be wrong, what does it mean? Do their companies/firms lose money because they mispredicted the future? Is it really difficult to predict the directions in this particular field and anticipate what the American consumer wants?

A brief history of the rise of AT&T

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The young might only think of AT&T as one of the major cell phone carriers. But this ignores AT&T’s long and important history that includes many innovations and cycles the company has gone through:

But AT&T didn’t just conquer the 20th-century via clever marketing, mergers, and strategic deals with the government. In an era profoundly distrustful of corporations, it justified its expansion as a bid to offer “universal service” to the country. “One policy, one system, universal service,” became AT&T’s motto. Rather than breaking up the system, the government would regulate it as a “natural monopoly.”…

For the next 50 years, AT&T would consistently repeat the same cycle to avoid being broken up by the government—innovate, acquire, strategically retreat, then move forward again with a redefined mission. When the public reacted badly to the network’s attempt to take over broadcast radio, AT&T backed off in exchange for a monopoly on wireline service between radio stations. When the government again raised the spectre of a breakup after the Second World War, AT&T agreed to get out of the computer software business, leasing innovations like the Unix operating system to universities for a nominal fee.

Interesting. The research and development arm of this company produced a number of important technological breakthroughs that helped the United States rise to the top of the world heap in the mid 1950s. The company may be once again on the verge of a monopoly but it is hard to refute, to paraphrase a well-known saying, that “what has been good for AT&T has been good for America.”

Syllabus bloat: the ever-lengthening college syllabus

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A professor discusses the reasons why college syllabi keep getting bigger:

Nowadays my course syllabi tend to run to many pages and always include a punctilious day-by-day calendar of the semester stipulating, for example, precisely which pages in what book students need to have read for class.  My instructions to students concerning formal written work have also become replete with prescription in a way that I would not have thought necessary even ten years ago.  Colleagues concur that instructors at the state-college level can take little or nothing for granted about student preparedness and that everything, absolutely everything, must be spelled out in advance.  Without abundant guidance and prescription, students complain of being lost, as perhaps they are, or of “not understanding what the professor wants,” as is perhaps the case…

First-year college students have a drastically diminished vision of what higher education portends for them.  The idea of discipline that enabled my UCLA instructors to assume procedural competency in their students, and that enabled most students to acquit themselves during the term with only a minimal syllabus, no longer exists…

The enlargement of the syllabus also stems from the need to define, explain, and insofar as possible justify the course itself, something that no syllabus from my undergraduate career ever bothered to do.  The syllabus of my survey of ancient literature (“Western Heritage”) addresses the basic notion of historical indebtedness, the idea of continuity of insight, and of the dignity of knowledge as opposed to ignominy of ignorance.  The syllabus also addresses the difficulty of reading; it tells students that an epic poem by Homer or a philosophical dialogue by Plato is not like a TV drama or a movie, in which in the first few minutes, one can predict the remainder…

Some of this effort—and much of the hypertrophied syllabus—is precautionary. It is precautionary on behalf of students, who, from day one, will know in advance every requirement and assignment of the course. It is also precautionary on behalf of the syllabus-writer, who seeks protection from petulant students claiming they never knew the schedule or failed to receive procedural knowledge concerning the semester.  Syllabus in hand, no one can plead ignorance.

The general idea is this: today’s college students need college explained to them, point by point. This could quickly turn into a generational argument that is bigger than just college classes: the role of college has changed from a place of learning to four years of job training. Society, and consequentially, college students simply don’t know what college is about when they should and professors have to do the extra work to explain it. This could also be tied to the issue that a number of college students are not ready to do college-level work.

There may be some truth to this but, as the article hints at, there could be good reasons to have longer syllabi:

1. Expectations are made clear from the beginning. This could cut down student’s anxiety as there is less “guesswork” involved. If a relatively short document (compared to books/journal articles) can help eliminate ignorance, why not?

2. Why not have a short part of the syllabus that explains what the class is about? Certain subjects, like sociology, are relatively unknown and a one or two paragraph introduction can give students a engaging foundation.

3. I like having the day-to-day calendar for myself so why not provide it for the students as well? Perhaps this is just because I like to be organized.

4. I wonder if a detailed and longer syllabi just by its thoroughness conveys to students the importance of the task. Some students may groan at seeing how much there is to read but others will feel the gravity.

We could transfer these ideas to another context: would many employees find it acceptable if they came to work each day with little idea of what to expect? On one hand, we should promote internal motivation but some structure is helpful. We can rue the loss of “gravity” and “mystery” that students have or feel regarding college or we can try to convey these ideas in our syllabi and what we say and do in the classroom.

h/t Instapundit

College athletes clustering in a few majors, including sociology

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I’ve written before about sociology being considered an “easy major” by athletes. A new report looks at some notable schools and considers how clustered male athletes are within majors:

Since the NCAA invented the APR [Academic Progress Rate] in 2003, critics have worried that it would discourage athletes from choosing difficult majors or from changing course once they started down a given track. Some have anticipated a “clustering” of athletes in certain majors, such as sociology or communication, and others have expressed concern about the creation of broad programs such as general studies with athletes in mind.

A 2008 analysis by USA Today found that clustering happens at most institutions, and of the three sports programs Shalala compares, Miami football is most questionable, with 62.5 percent of the team studying one of two majors. While clustering on a small scale isn’t necessarily unusual, researchers who study the phenomenon say the 25-percent mark is where things start getting fishy.

A full 37.5 percent of Miami’s junior and senior football players were majoring in liberal arts in 2008, and 25 percent in sports administration. The same 37.5 percent of Stanford’s junior and senior softball players were in one major — but it was human biology — and 36.8 percent of baseball players majored in sociology. Notre Dame athletes didn’t cluster at all, according to USA Today’s analysis.

While this report by Donna Shalala, president of Miami, seems tied to troubles their football program has with violating NCAA regulations, the USA Today 2008 analysis offers more insights. While sociology is lumped within the social sciences, you can mouse over the graphics and while the most clustering seems to happen in the social sciences, the sociology clusters are numerous.

Alas, this collected data is still limited:

Assisted by sports information and other school offices, USA TODAY obtained the majors for about 85% of the athletes in the study. For most of the rest, no major was listed. Primary or first-listed majors were used in the cases of students with multiple majors.

Initially, part of the intent was to compare the percentages of athletes in a major with those of the student body as a whole. That is, if 30% of baseball players are in sociology, is 30% of the entire student body enrolled in sociology? However, short of getting athletes’ private records and the federal reporting code of each athlete’s major, large-scale comparisons are unreliable because some schools have multiple versions of some majors.

The NCAA collects similar information, but does not release it and has no current plans to study it.

Hmmm…I wonder why the NCAA has no interest in analyzing this data.

Bringing the Middletown study to the stage at Ball State

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The Middletown studies are classics within the field of sociology. Students at Ball State, located in “Middletown” itself, are adapting the project for the stage:

Almost a century later, 40 theatre and sociology students join in an immersive project to take the social experiment and put it in motion in live theater.

“The thing about the Middletown studies and what Robert and Helen Lynd were trying to accomplish was ground-breaking,” Jennifer Blackmer, associate professor of the Department of Theatre, said. “They came to Muncie to study Middle America like they would a tribe in New Guinea.”…

Beginning in spring 2011, the students conducted around 60 interviews with Muncie community members and studied various records of the Middletown studies, including the products of the Lynds studies: “Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture,” published in 1929, and “Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts,” written as the couple revisited Muncie in the midst of the Great Depression. Students admit they were skeptical at the project’s start…

The couple serves as two personalities in the play among a cast of four main characters; the Lynds who are conducting their study in the 1920s, and two fictional Ball State sociology students trying to copy the Middletown study process. There are sixteen voices in the play of both students and community theater actors.

I would be interested in seeing this. It could bring life to some classic studies that most (all?) college students have never heard of but in their time revealed a lot about “normal” America. Plus, it allows students to connect with their community, linking art with real life. Just as some sociologists have started pursuing video projects and blogs, could theater (and art more broadly) become a way that sociologists share their findings?

Though the study isn’t referenced much in sociology these days, I am including it in current lectures in my American Suburbanization class. When talking about the rise of the automobile, the Middletown studies reveal some interesting details: people basically changed their lives so that they could drive around. The American love affair with the car started early and changed cultural patterns and values as well in addition to the obvious changes in development patterns.

Shopping Harvard students flock to “Sociology 109: Leadership and Organizations”

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Harvard has a tradition that students can spent the early days of the semester “shopping” among classes before settling on what they will take throughout the semester. A sociology class, Sociology 109: Leadership and Organization, was apparently quite popular during this shopping period:

Peter Chen ’13 had shopped the perennially popular Sociology 109: “Leadership and Organizations” last fall, so he expected the course to be somewhat crowded when he visited it again Wednesday on the first day of shopping period.

But when he arrived at the start of the class, student shoppers were already overflowing out the door, blocking Chen’s entrance into the lecture hall.

“I tried to push in a little bit and funnel into the room,” said Chen, who was forced to stand outside the lecture hall for about 10 minutes before wiggling his way into a newly empty chair.

Another Sociology 109 shopper, Stephanie L. Grayson ’14, said she showed up a full 20 minutes early to ensure a seat in the class, which she suspected would be crowded because it was taught by popular sociology lecturer David L. Ager. The course—which will be lotteried down to 80 students by the end of shopping period—drew about 180 shoppers, according to Ager.

What I am interested in is this: why is this particular class so popular? The article hints at a few reasons that certain classes are overflowing in the shopping period: they fulfill certain general education requirements or, as indicated regarding Sociology 109, has a popular lecturer. These are not unusual reasons.

But looking at the title of the course, I wonder if another factor is at work: this sociology class has direct implications for business. The professor has “a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior, a joint degree granted by Harvard Business School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.” Additionally, he has worked with both businesses and governments:

Ager has consulted and taught for several large multinational firms from different industries including finance, high-technology, hospitality, consumer products, bio-technology, bio-energy, telecommunications, and wholesale distribution. In addition, he has advised large, family controlled businesses around the world. His list of clients includes companies such as Mars, Inc., Rockefeller & Co., Inc., Caterpillar, and Morgan Stanley. His consulting activities include leadership development, strategic planning, talent management, change management, M&A, team building and succession planning.

Prior to coming to Harvard, Ager worked as an adviser to Cabinet Ministers in the Fisheries and Oceans and the Employment and Immigration portfolios of the Canadian government. He also served as a member of the finance organization at Nortel and as the Director of the Mexico Research Initiative at the Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario.

While students might have difficulty seeing how sociology classes directly relate to business settings, this class seems uniquely positioned to attract business majors, entrepreneurial types, and others who might otherwise think sociology is impractical.

Or perhaps there is a growing demand among sociology students for organizational theory. It does seem to be growing within sociology itself.

The growing field of the “sociology of disasters”

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Inside Higher Ed features a growing subfield of sociology: the sociology of disasters.

When a hurricane or earthquake strikes, a small group of unusual first responders is at the ready: sociologists.

In the past two decades, the ranks of researchers who study disasters, natural and otherwise, have seen their numbers swell. In the wake of a tornado or a hurricane — or an oil spill or terrorist attack — these sociologists examine how traditional areas of inquiry, such as issues related to race, gender or social class, unfold in extreme situations.

“They are a really unique opportunity to understand our social world,” said Alice Fothergill, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, of disasters, which she described as a more extreme version of everyday life. “Whatever the behavior is, it’s more exaggerated or sped up in time. There are all these ways in which people are finding that it’s this valuable setting, where people are finding that they have insights that they might not have during non-disaster times.”

Interest among sociologists in researching disasters and their aftermath increased after Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992. But it spiked even more after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and especially Hurricane Katrina, which is widely credited with drawing more attention to the racial and socioeconomic aspects of a disaster’s impact. Many argued that the black citizens of New Orleans have had a more difficult time getting support — and that the city that is emerging is less hospitable to them.

The article suggests this is a relatively recent development; why is this the case? Disasters, natural or manmade, are not restricted to the past few decades. Could it be tied to globalization which means that we all receive news and images quickly whenever any disaster happens pretty much anywhere in the world? Disasters do tend to make good (read: entertaining/engrossing) news and now they seem to have wider emotional impact. Could it be tied to the growing number of resources that are spent each year by governments and other organizations in response to disasters? Perhaps more than ever more, the “correct” response now matters in terms of public opinion and using resources wisely.

Time magazine: “100 Best Nonfiction Books”

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Perhaps you have seen the popular Facebook questionnaire where you are asked how many of the 100 great works of fiction you have read. Now someone can start one of these lists for non-fiction books: Time has put together a list of the “100 Best Nonfiction Books” – since Time first started publishing in 1923.

I would really like to know how these books were selected. Fast Food Nation? Ball Four? No sociology books? For example, The Truly Disadvantaged influenced a lot of policy about inner-city neighborhoods and public housing.

While people probably read some of the best 100 fiction texts in English classes, where would the average student or American run across these non-fiction books? Many are not used in school. Non-fiction books don’t seem particular popular compared to genres like mystery or romance novels.

It would be interesting to see sales figures for all of these books.