(Press-News.org) LAWRENCE -- Compulsory schooling laws instituted in the late 1800s and early 1900s caused more people in Northern states to marry people at their same education level and race, possibly contributing to economic inequality, according to a University of Kansas researcher's study.
Emily Rauscher, a KU assistant professor of Sociology, found no increase in assortative mating in Southern states as a result of the laws, suggesting the influence of educational expansion on marital sorting depends on context.
"It's difficult to know why the compulsory laws had different effects in the North and the South. I can only speculate, but perhaps schools were becoming more strongly segregated with the Great Migration in the 1800s," she said. "Black people were mostly migrating to urban centers in the North. As people married someone that they met in school who had a similar level of education, those people also happened to be of the same race as them."
Rauscher's article "Effects of Early U.S. Compulsory Schooling Laws on Educational Assortative Mating: The Important of Context" appears online in the journal Demography.
Compulsory schooling laws required students to attend school to a certain age, and Rauscher in other studies has found the requirement benefitted minority students and also contributed to creating better jobs and upgraded the opportunities of the American workforce especially in the 1900s.
Federal officials and many states are currently considering the benefits of compulsory schooling laws. President Barack Obama has advocated for all states to increase the mandatory schooling age to 18, and Tennessee and Oregon have passed plans to offer two years of free community college to qualifying students.
Rauscher said the results about educational expansion on assortative mating were somewhat surprising. Nationally, the laws had minimal impact, but when she broke down her analysis by region, she found the differences. Modernization theory had predicted that rising education should increase people marrying those at the same education level but also increase interracial marriages.
For the study she used log-linear and log-multiplicative models of male household heads ages 36 to 75 in 1940 U.S. census data, which was the first census to include educational attainment information.
She said possibly due to regional differences in economic development, educational expansion increased assortative mating in the North but reduced it in the less-developed South. Northern states at the time were more industrialized, while Southern states relied more on agriculture.
Schools in the North could have been racially segregated especially in urban areas, which would be an important thing to consider today when considering compulsory schooling expansion, Rauscher said. She said if people more often marry someone of their same level of education, it can make it tougher for those living in poverty to use the educational system to improve their economic status.
"It could contribute to inequality," Rauscher said. "I don't want to underplay many other advantages of compulsory schooling. This is just one possible downside."
She said more research is likely needed, especially to look at differences by individual states or metropolitan areas.
INFORMATION:
Solo travellers don't go alone because they have to, they do it because they want to, a new Queensland University of Technology study has found.
Professor Constanza (Connie) Bianchi, from QUT Business School, said there were a growing number of people who preferred to travel alone, despite having family and friends.
She said solo travellers were choosing freedom, uncompromised fun and meeting new people over the desire to have a companion to share their experiences.
In a study published in the International Journal of Tourism Research, Professor Bianchi looked at ...
This news release is available in Japanese.
An international research team has some good news for the struggling honeybee, and the millions of people who depend on them to pollinate crops and other plants.
These valuable pollinators have faced widespread colony losses over the past decade, largely due to the spread of a predatory mite called Varroa destructor. But the bees might not be in as dire a state as it seems, according to research recently published in Nature Communications.
Researchers found a population of wild bees from around Ithaca, New York, which ...
Current international disease surveillance systems are mainly based on reports made by doctors after treatment of infected patients. As a consequence, disease-causing microorganisms and resistance bacteria have time to spread and make large population groups sick before they are detected.
There is currently only very limited information about the global occurrence and transfer of antimicrobial resistance and infectious diseases.
Researchers at the National Food Institute and DTU Systems Biology are working to develop faster methods to detect and respond to outbreaks ...
Scientists at VIB and KU Leuven have shown that blocking the PHD1 oxygen sensor hinders the activation of p53, a transcription factor that aids colorectal cancer (CRC) cells in repairing themselves and thus resisting chemotherapy. Chemotherapy resistance remains a major clinical issue in the treatment of CRC. These findings indicate that PHD1 inhibition may have valuable therapeutic potential. The study was published in the leading medical journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, which features molecular biology-driven research.
Chemotherapy remains the most widely used cancer ...
Safinamide (trade name: Xadago) has been available since February 2015 as add-on therapy for the treatment of mid- to late-stage Parkinson disease in adults. In combination with levodopa alone or together with other Parkinson disease medicinal products, this monoamine oxidase (MAO-B) inhibitor is used to help restore dopamine levels in the brain. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether this drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy.
Such an added benefit cannot be derived ...
The study, by scientists at the University of St Andrews, shows that simple increases in a man's height and age automatically makes them appear more dominant.
The research, published today (Wednesday 19 August 2015) by the SAGE journal 'Perception', sheds light on why Hollywood directors might choose certain actors to play leading roles.
The study was carried out by Carlota Batres, Daniel Re, and Professor David Perrett of the Perception Lab at the University's School of Psychology & Neuroscience.
Carlota and her team used computer graphic manipulations to make subtle ...
The older the clinician, the more likely they are to think playing video games leads to violent behavior, according to new research published in Computers in Human Behavior.
Psychology professor Dr. Christopher Ferguson, author of the study from Stetson University, US, says his findings go some way to explaining why people have different opinions about the effect of video games and suggests many of the reasons come down to generational issues. For parents, one way to close this gap is speaking to children and testing out the games themselves.
As long as video games ...
WASHINGTON and NEW YORK (August 19, 2015)--A new report examining newly-released data from the 2014 Uniform Data System (UDS), which collects patient and health care information from the nation's community health centers, shows how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is changing insurance coverage and health care in the nation's most medically underserved urban and rural communities. Examining data collected from nearly 1,300 federally funded health centers operating in over 9,000 locations, the report shows that between 2013 and 2014, the number of health center patients with ...
CHICAGO, IL, August 19, 2015 - A new study revealed that your cereal choice at breakfast might have an impact on how much you eat for lunch. Newly published research in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition showed that a hearty bowl of instant oatmeal helped curb food intake at lunch better than a leading oat-based, cold cereal -- even when each bowl provided the same number of calories.
The statistically significant results of the randomized, controlled crossover study (n=47) showed that a 250-calorie instant oatmeal serving (with an additional 113 calories ...
Racial disparity in mortgage rates is widespread between black and white borrowers, according to a newly published study which found more financially vulnerable black women suffer the most.
The study, led by Ping Cheng, Ph.D., professor of finance in Florida Atlantic University's College of Business, used data from three waves of U.S. Survey of Consumer Finance and found that black borrowers on average pay about 29 basis points more than comparable white borrowers, or .29 percent more. Their article was published in the July 2015 issue of The Journal of Real Estate Finance ...
