Parental Socioeconomic Status and Students' Postsecondary Educational Attainment: Exploring the Mediating Role of Students' Participation in Extracurricular Activities During High School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest (Benjamin Franklin). Benjamin Franklin's cogent observation continues to hold true in North America. Postsecondary educational attainment is a consistent and reliable indicator of an individual's wellbeing in adulthood (Ermisch & Pronzato, 2010). In light of this, Canadian educational policies emphasize inclusiveness and equity (Alberta Education, 2017), however, despite efforts to equalize in-school conditions for students, the OECD reports that 9.4% of Canadian students' mathematics performance is determined by their socioeconomic status (OECD, 2015). These differences are further exacerbated at the postsecondary level, where rates of attainment and types of degree pursued differ greatly between students of different socioeconomic backgrounds (Krahn, 2017; Finnie & Mueller, 2008). It is important, therefore, to examine factors that allow for this relationship to persist, such as extracurricular activity participation. This study explores the mediating role of extracurricular activity participation in high school (at age 18) on the relationship between parental socioeconomic status and students' postsecondary educational attainment at age 25. I use data collected for the Alberta High School Graduate Survey (1996) and Follow-up Survey (2003) by Dr. Harvey Krahn and the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta to examine the effect of students' extracurricular participation in high school on their postsecondary educational attainment using structural regression modeling techniques. This study delineates activities by type, into high-, mid-, and low- brow activities, as prior research conducted in the United States has indicated that such factors might influence the focal relationship (Guest & Schneider, 2003; Schreiber & Chambers, 2002). I use Bourdieu and Passeron's (1990) theory of social and cultural reproduction in education to examine the role of participation in extracurricular activities in facilitating the greater postsecondary educational attainment of students from high socioeconomic backgrounds. I also use Lareau's (2002) model of the concerted cultivation parenting style to explain the ways in which high socioeconomic status is linked to high socioeconomic students' greater extracurricular participation. In this study, I did not find a mediating effect of different types of extracurricular activities, high- and mid- brow activity participation, on the focal relationship between parental socioeconomic status and respondents' postsecondary educational attainment. Results, however, indicate higher levels of participation in both high- and mid- brow activities among students from higher socioeconomic status families. Furthermore, I found a direct relationship between greater high- and mid- brow activity participation at age 18 and respondents' higher educational attainment levels at age 25. I discuss implications of these findings and recommendations for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".