On the Edge of Commitment Educational Attainment and Race in the United States [Hardcover]

The importance of educational certification for labor market success has increased since the 1970s. But social sciences still cannot answer a fundamental question: Who goes to college and why? InOn the Edge of Commitment, Stephen L. Morgan offers a new model of educational achievement to explain why some students are committed to preparation for college.Morgan's model unites in one common framework the forward-looking cost-benefit assessments of students with social influence processes. The model is then used to explain puzzling race differences in patterns of high school achievement and subsequent rates of college enrollment. The book, using this model, makes a major theoretical statement on the process of educational achievement, which will help to launch a new generation of empirical work. On the Edge of Commitmentis a provocative assessment of how young people decide how far to go in school. Morgan advances a novel and technically sophisticated synthesis of socialization and rational choice perspectives on educational attainment, and sets out a promising agenda for the next generation of educational stratification research. This book offers a new model of educational achievement to explain why some students are committed to preparation for college. A remarkable book that develops a new model for analyzing educational attainment. Fusing essential arguments from two important research traditionsrational choice theory and status socialization theoryMorgan outlines a model that addresses and overcomes the previous shortcomings of both traditions. Stephen L. Morgan is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. Stephen Morgan's theoretically innovative and statistically sophisticated book provides a compelling model for addressing...crucial issues. [This book] shows very convincingly that inferring causality from the association between expectations and attainment is speculative at best. . . Without a doubt, this book sets a new reselCÚ