Family Socioeconomic Status, Peers, and the Path to College

Drawing on the primary/secondary effects perspective of educational inequality, this mixed methods study inves-tigated connections between high school students ’ trajectories through college preparatory course work and their rela-tionships with parents and peers as a channel in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality. Growth curve and multilevel analyses of national survey and transcript data revealed that having college-educated parents differentiated students ’ enrollment in advanced course work at the start of high school and that this initial disparity was stably maintained over subsequent years. During this starting period of high school, exposure to school-based peer groups characterized by higher levels of parent education appeared to amplify these course work dis-parities between students with and without college-educated parents. Ethnographic data from a single high school pointed to possible mechanisms for these patterns, including the tendency for students with college-educated parents to have more information about the relative weight of grades, core courses, and electives in college going and for academically relevant information from school peers with college-educated parents to matter most to students ’ course work when it matched what was coming from their own parents. Keywords: academic achievement; education; high school; peer relations; socioeconomic inequality. With economic returns to higher education reaching historic levels, secondary education has become a high-stakes game in which a series of academic “moves ” shape long-term trajectorie