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During the past few decades, South Korea has experienced a remarkable educational expansion at its secondary and tertiary levels as well as at the primary level, resulting in extraordinary variation between the educational attainment of recent and older cohorts. Using 1990 data from the Social Inequality Study in Korea, the study examines trends in the influence of social background on educational attainment across three male cohorts born between 1921 and 1970. Although in general the impacts of social origin have changed little at the secondary levels of education, there is a significant reduction in the effect of father’s occupation on the odds of completing middle school for the youngest cohort. From a multinomial model of transitions to each type of tertiary education, it is found that family background has a stronger effect in the transition from high school to four-year university than to junior college. Interestingly, there has been an increase across cohorts in the influence of father’s education on the likelihood of entering a university, while such a pattern is not observed for the transition to junior college.

Understanding of the effects of formal education on HIV/AIDS infection in South Saharan Africa (SSA) has been a complex task because consecutive waves of research offer different, seemingly contradictory results and explanations of what exactly are the schooling effects on HIV/AIDS and the causal mechanisms driving those effects. This chapter concentrates on the narrative and implications of the key substantive findings from a multidisciplinary scientific team that was formed to explore the precise nature of the relationship between population education and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in SSA and to determine the main causal mechanisms behind the association. As members of this team, this chapter reviews and synthesizes our technical demographic, epidemiological, and health research. This, and other relevant research, suggests that, like in other cases of education and health risk, because of a historical change in the public health and information environment during the pandemic there was a shift in which outcomes of education dominated individual's sexual and disease prevention behavior. The SSA HIV/AIDS case is thoroughly examined, and then used to bridge to a general discussion of the effects of educational development on population health.

In their authoritative literature review, Breen and Jonsson (2005) claim that ‘one of the most significant trends in the study of inequalities in educational attainment in the past decade has been the resurgence of rational-choice models focusing on educational decision making’. The starting point of the present contribution is that these models have largely ignored the explanatory relevance of social interactions. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper introduces a micro-founded formal model of the macro-level structure of educational inequality, which frames educational choices as the result of both subjective ability/benefit evaluations and peer-group pressures. As acknowledged by Durlauf (2002, 2006) and Akerlof (1997), however, while the social psychology and ethnographic literature provides abundant empirical evidence of the explanatory relevance of social interactions, statistical evidence on their causal effect is still flawed by identification and selection bias problems. To assess the relative explanatory contribution of the micro-level and network-based mechanisms hypothesised, the paper opts for agent-based computational simulations. In particular, the technique is used to deduce the macro-level consequences of each mechanism (sequentially introduced) and to test these consequences against French aggregate individual-level survey data. The paper's main result is that ability and subjective perceptions of education benefits, no matter how intensely differentiated across agent groups, are not sufficient on their own to generate the actual stratification of educational choices across educational backgrounds existing in France at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By computational counterfactual manipulations, the paper proves that network-based interdependencies among educational choices are instead necessary, and that they contribute, over and above the differentiation of ability and of benefit perceptions, to the genesis of educational stratification by amplifying the segregation of the educational choices that agents make on the basis of purely private ability/benefit calculations.

This study examines the extent to which educational outcomes are transmitted from mothers to daughters in rural China. An analysis of the 2010 China Family Panel Survey reveals that: (i) how far daughters go in their education is strongly associated with their mothers’ education; (ii) the association between mothers’ and daughters’ educational outcomes in rural China was found to be stronger than the corresponding relationships between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons, especially at higher levels of education; and (iii) while having more brothers and being born later worsens daughters’ educational outcomes, mothers’ higher education effectively mitigates these negative effects. These findings add to a growing body of literature and empirical evidence that challenges conventional social mobility research paradigms that neglect mothers’ roles. More importantly, the distinction between mother–daughter relationship and that between fathers and daughters and mothers and sons highlights the fact that education is likely transmitted intergenerationally via mechanisms that differ depending on the gendered parent–child pairs.

Within individual countries, the paths towards increasing educational attainment are not always linear and individuals are not equally affected. Differences between boys’ and girls’ educational attainments are a common expression of this inequality as boys are more often favored for continued schooling. We examine the importance of birth cohort, sibship size, migration, and school accessibility for explaining both the gender gap and its narrowing in secondary schooling in one district in Northeast Thailand between 1984 and 1994. Birth cohort is a significant explanation for the narrowing of the gender gap. Migration, sibship size, and remote village location are important explanations for limited secondary education opportunities, especially for girls.

Purpose – This chapter proposes a new model to explain how increased religiosity among children leads to higher eventual educational attainment; it does so by focusing upon the unique role that parental religiosity plays in this process – this intergenerational dimension has been neglected in previous research on the topic.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Using NLSY97 data, employing regression techniques, and incorporating information on parental religious behaviors, this chapter tests whether parental religiosity only matters because it transmits religiosity to children, and once children become religious themselves, parental religiosity becomes a redundant resource – or it has a powerful independent effect net of this socialization process.

Finding – Results generally support the parental religiosity theory, where parental religious service attendance uniquely produces positive educational effects, even net of religious socialization ones. Religious affiliation differences are generally minor. Additional models also provide evidence that parental religiosity and adolescent education are not related via some omitted variable.

Research limitations/Implications – Under this new perspective, children's educational attainment can rise, even if children are not religious themselves, because parental religiosity can promote parental behaviors conducive to children's schooling.

Originality/Value – Overall, parental religiosity deserves renewed attention as a cultural basis for inequality in the United States today.

Legal and philosophical scholarship on religious education typically focuses on religious schools that challenge core liberal values. Religious schools that offer their students quality secular education, and whose religious character is mild, do not raise these concerns and have therefore evaded scrutiny thus far. This chapter argues that the latter kind of religious schools, which I call “creaming religious schools,” may have a negative effect on educational equality and should therefore be subject to restrictive legal regulation. The negative effect on equality is caused by the fact that when successful, these schools appeal not only to members of the religious community but also to non-member high-achieving students who leave the public schools (a process called creaming) thus weakening them. The chapter argues that the harm caused to public schools cannot be redeemed by alluding to the right to religious education because the religious justification for creaming religious schools is relatively weak. The chapter then examines several potential legal measures for contending with creaming religious schools: the antidiscrimination doctrine, which the chapter rejects, showing that it actually aggravates creaming, locating schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods, restricting tuition, reflective enrollment policy, and finally, the total prohibition of establishing creaming religious schools.

This study explores the impact of parents’ and children’s early expectations on children’s later school persistence and completion of compulsory and secondary education, paying special attention to the parent-child agreement in early educational expectations. Results from analyzing longitudinal data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF) show that children often carry educational expectations quite different from their parents’. Consistent with previous research, children’s and their parents’ early expectations are strong predictors of children’s later educational attainment. More importantly, the analysis reveals that children benefit greatly when they share with their parents’ high expectations. Those children whose high expectations aligned with their parents fair best in later educational outcomes: They are more likely to complete compulsory education and secondary education. The combined determination of parents and children can help moderate the negative impact of poverty and facilitate children’s continued efforts in fulfilling their expectations. This positive impact holds even for children from the most impoverished families. This study points to the importance to recognize that there are non-material resources that family could provide to advance children’s education.

Community household survey data tested the intervening role (between education and reported health outcomes) of adaptations of Antonovsky’s (1987) tripartite sense of coherence (SOC). Comprehensibility was indexed by clarity and responsiveness of insurance representatives, manageability was measured by problems reported with physician office visits, and meaningfulness was assessed with household members’ community health activities. SOC measures did not link education to either impairments or to health lifestyle scores. Comprehensibility and manageability linked education with self-reported well-being. Education and manageability each reduced impairments, while education, manageability, and meaningfulness increased lifestyle totals. Results help elucidate the influence of education on health.

The purpose of this research is to examine the characteristics and participation patterns in culture and art activities by multicultural groups through comparative examination using logistic regression analysis. Regarding the differences of participation patterns of cultural activities, the results show that there are meaningful changes of participation patterns by race. Income level seems to have dissipated as a barrier in attending cultural activities. In contrast, there is a meaningful change in the relationship between educational attainment and attendance in cultural activities. There are differences in art exhibition attendance by race. Income and educational attainment are also closely related to art exhibition attendance. The results of the analysis imply that it is necessary to segment the consumers of culture and art events specifically by race, income level, or educational attainment.