In a new book published today by the Russell Sage Foundation, Coming of Age in the Other America, Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin explore how some disadvantaged urban youth manage to achieve upward mobility despite overwhelming odds. Based on over a decade of the authors’ original fieldwork with parents and children in Baltimore, the book illuminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families and shows how the right public policies can help break the cycle of disadvantage.

Several news articles have already cited research from the book, including a profile in the Atlantic which outlines the authors’ study in detail, including how they interviewed 150 young adults and tracked “how those kids had fared in various areas between 2003 and 2012, including education, employment, family status, mental, and physical health and risk behaviors.” In their research, the authors found that youth who had been able to move to better neighborhoods—either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means—achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents.

The American system of higher education includes over 5,000 degree granting institutions, ranging from small for-profit technical training schools up to the nation’s elite liberal arts colleges and research universities. Over 20 million students are enrolled, with federal, state, and local governments spending almost 3 percent of GDP on higher education. Yet how can we evaluate the effectiveness of such a large, fragmented system? Are students being adequately prepared for today’s labor market? Is the system accessible to all? Are new business methods contributing to greater efficiency and better student outcomes? In "Higher Education Effectiveness," a new open-access issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, editors Steven Brint and Charles Clotfelter and a group of higher education experts address these questions with new evidence and insights regarding the effectiveness of U.S. higher education.

Beginning with the editors’ authoritative introduction, the contributors assess the effectiveness of U.S. higher education at the national, state, campus, and classroom levels. Several focus on the effects of the steep decline in state funding in recent years, which has contributed to rising tuition at most state universities. Steven Hemelt and David Marcotte find that the financial burdens of attendance, even at public institutions, is a significant and growing impediment for students from low-income families. John Witte, Barbara Wolfe, and Sara Dahill-Brown analyze 36 years of enrollment trends at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and find increased enrollment of upper-income students, suggesting widening inequality of access.

This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

The recent unexpected successes of two insurgent presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, have taken the Democratic and Republican parties respectively by surprise. The rise of such “outsider” politicians has raised questions over whether establishment party leaders are increasingly disconnected from the preferences and concerns of their constituents. If voters have indeed begun to gravitate to non-establishment candidates for the presidency, are we likely to see similar upsets in congressional and local elections?

RSF Visiting Scholar Jonathan Nagler (New York University) is currently working on a book that examines how increases in economic inequality have also affected voter turnout in congressional elections from 1972 through 2014. Using a variety of data sources not previously available, he is studying the ideologies of congressional candidates across many elections, and exploring how turnout is affected by the ways in which voters from different income groups perceive those candidates' positions.

In an interview with the Foundation, Nagler discussed some of the factors that have affected voter turnout in both presidential and Congressional elections, and assessed whether non-voters share the preferences of voters.

Q. Your ongoing research at RSF investigates the ways in which rising income inequality has affected voter turnout across different demographics in both presidential and congressional elections. Are the preferences expressed by voters in these elections also held by non-voters? What drives the low voter turnout of those at the bottom of the economic distribution?

Former RSF Visiting Scholar Kathleen Vohs has been named Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she is currently also Land O' Lakes Chair in Marketing in the Carlson School of Management. The university’s Distinguished McKnight University Professorship program recognizes outstanding faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status.

During her time at the Foundation, from 2013-2014, Vohs investigated the self-sufficiency theory of money—or the idea that money is a source of independence for people that has both negative and positive effects on their behavior—as part of a working group with Roy Baumeister. Vohs and Baumeister are also co-editors with George Lowenstein of the 2007 RSF book Do Emotions Help or Hurt?

A number of RSF grantees and authors recently appeared in the news to discuss ongoing shifts in the U.S. labor market. Following the release of the February jobs report, Harry Holzer, co-author of the 2011 RSF book, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going?, spoke to several outlets about the addition of 242,000 new jobs to the economy. “I view this mostly as a good report. The job creation number was very good,” he told NBC News. In an interview with the Washington Post, he added that middle-aged workers who had dropped out of the workforce during the recession were starting to re-enter in significant numbers. Their re-entry, he said, has been “going on consistently since October. So it doesn’t look like a blip anymore. That seems important to me.”

Yet, longer-term changes to the labor market have presented cause for concern. The New York Times highlighted research by RSF trustee Lawrence Katz and former trustee Alan Kreuger that shows that the percentage of workers in “alternative work arrangements”—or contract and temporary workers—has increased by over 5 percent in the last decade. Katz told the Times that in addition to high unemployment rates during the recession, new technology has likely played a role in accelerating the rise of temporary, “flexible” work arrangements. “Call center workers can be at home. Independent truck drivers can be monitored for the efficiency of their routes. Monitoring makes contracting more feasible,” he said.

This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

In the current election cycle, social inequality has emerged as a leading issue for the two Democratic candidates. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have debated policies for combating inequality, including proposals to raise the minimum wage, expand health care, and increase access to higher education. Both campaigns have also argued that their respective platforms will help address racial inequality. For example, Sanders has stated that his proposal to raise federal minimum wage to $15/hour will disproportionately benefit black and Latino workers, while Clinton has announced a plan for an “Economic Revitalization Initiative” that she claims will expand access to jobs within communities of color.

Yet, as Visiting Scholar William Darity (Duke University) points out in a Dissent article co-authored with Mark Paul, Alan Aja, and Darrick Hamilton, “No presidential candidate is proposing the bold legislation necessary to close the racial wealth gap.” During his time in residence at the Foundation, Darity is investigating the persistence of wealth disparities by race in the U.S. Using data from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC), Darity and his colleagues have authored several reports on racial wealth disparities, including the recent “The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles.”

In a new interview with the Foundation, Darity discussed some of the causes and effects of this wealth gap and offered policy solutions for ameliorating persistent disparities.

Q. Your current research at RSF investigates the racial wealth gap in the U.S. While labor economists tend to believe that wealth gaps are driven primarily by income disparities, your ongoing work has explored the ways in which the opposite is true: that wealth disparities might, in fact, drive income disparities. Why doesn't income alone explain the racial wealth gap?

Several new research projects in the Russell Sage Foundation’s programs on Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, Social Inequality, and Behavioral Economics were funded at the Foundation’s February meeting of the Board of Trustees. Four new projects in the special initiative on the Social, Economic, and Political Effects of the Affordable Care Act were jointly funded with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration:

Ethnicity and English-Language Proficiency and Experiences with Crime and Police: A Multi-Level Analysis of Restricted Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey
Eric Baumer and John Iceland (Pennsylvania State University)

Baumer and Iceland will analyze restricted-use survey data on incidents of crime and crime reporting, along with demographic Census data and police department data, to explore whether and how ethnicity and English-language proficiency correlate with immigrants’ crime reporting and law enforcement’s official responses to those reported crimes.

Cast as a Criminal: How Moral Typecasting Leads to Racial Prejudice
Kurt Gray (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Keith Payne (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi (University of Kentucky)

Gray, Payne, and Brown-Iannuzzi will explore whether moral typecasting can help explain aggressive law enforcement tactics towards non-whites, especially black men. They will examine the role of typecasting in situations of heightened ambiguity, such as adolescence (not a child but not an adult) and whether this leads law enforcement to be biased against black adolescent males.