The term “deaths of despair” was coined in 2015 by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe the increasing mortality rate for White Americans without college degrees due to drug over-doses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. These deaths were attributed to the despondency experienced by the White working class, who were left behind by changes in the American economy. However, the mortality picture has changed since then. Mortality rates are now rising among both Black and White Americans without a college degree. Nearly all major causes of death are increasing more, or decreasing less, for people without college degrees. The educational gap in mortality has become so severe that, in 2021, adult life expectancy was more than eight years higher among college graduates. In this double issue of RSF, Case, Deaton, sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors move beyond the concept of “deaths of despair” to explore the widening educational gap in mortality. 

Issue 5 provides new perspectives on the education gap in mortality as well as new viewpoints on the non-college population. Christopher L. Foote and colleagues show that much of the educational gap in mortality may be due to smoking. One of the most popular explanations for the growing mortality gap is that college unlocks better job opportunities. However, Sam Arenberg and Sam Stripling find that what may matter for longer life expectancy is not so much having a “good” job as having a job at all, as high school dropouts with jobs have lower mortality rates than college graduates without them. Victor Tan Chen and colleagues reveal that people with opioid use disorders experience “precarity chains”: overlapping, connected hazards that combine to put people at increased risk of substance abuse.

Issue 6 also gives new viewpoints on the non-college population and examines geographic and international variation in mortality. Grace Landrum-Hall and colleagues discover that men with health issues repeatedly enter and exit the formal labor force—referred to as “churning”—owing to inflexible employer policies and insufficient income support program policies. Jennifer Karas Montez and col-leagues show that rural areas and small cities have seen increases in mortality, while large urban areas have seen decreases. Iliya Gutin and colleagues find that the educational gap in health and well-being is typically larger in the US than in Britain. This may be because education in the US—and the resulting higher salaries—allows for more access to health-promoting resources.

This double issue of RSF provides fascinating insights into the stark and alarming mortality gap between those with and without a college degree in the US.

DOWNLOAD A FREE DIGITAL COPY

As climate change intensifies, weather becomes more extreme and climate hazards like wildfires and hurricanes become more frequent and more destructive. While climate change affects the entire global population, the risk and consequences of experiencing climate hazards are not shared equally. In the US, lower socioeconomic status groups and people of color are disproportionately more at risk for experiencing climate hazards and face more difficulty recovering from them. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Max Besbris, Manuel Pastor, and Anna Rhodes, economist Wolfram Schlenker, political scientist Pamela Winston, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine the impact of climate change on inequality in the US.

The eleven articles in this issue investigate the consequences of climate hazards for inequality, examining impacts on housing, neighborhoods, and employment; the ways inequality emerges in recovery from climate-related disasters; and how politicians and other actors respond to climate change. As flood risk increases in communities across the US, local authorities are partnering with federal agencies to implement buyout programs as a tool for managed retreat. James R. Elliott and colleagues find that in majority-White communities, where most buyouts take place, homeowners more commonly opt to sell their homes on the private market instead, which creates a revolving door of risk rather than eliminating it. Property insurance is essential for mediating losses and facilitating hurricane recovery, yet timely and fair claims are not guaranteed. Bad faith claims handling can put residents’ housing stability and financial well-being at risk, leading many to file lawsuits to dispute the outcome of their claims. Hannah K. Friedrich and col-leagues find that litigation against insurers is more likely in areas that have a higher percentage of Black residents and that case duration is longer for residents in these areas, reflecting that systemic procedural inequalities can amplify disparities in disaster recovery. Cadence Willse finds that in the wake of major climate-related disasters, Democrats are more likely to increase their support for environmental policies, while Republicans are less likely to vote in favor of them. Megan Mullin investigates whether support for managed retreat programs by local governments differs if residents are viewed as wealthy or low-income. She finds that local elected officials are more likely to support buyout programs for low-income homeowners.

This timely issue of RSF expertly enhances our understanding of the intersection of climate disasters and inequality.

The typical image of a Dreamer is an undocumented Latinx youth—brought to the U.S. through no choice of their own—who excels academically and aspires to contribute to the U.S. economy. This image has engendered political good will and helped push through an executive order that created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, but it is limited. It fails to account for the full spectrum of diversity among undocumented youth. It also leaves the Dreamer figure stuck in a stage of youth and innocence waiting for immigration reform to allow them to finally transition to adulthood. There is little room in the Dreamer narrative for navigating complex family obligations, employment, entering adult relationships, or other markers of adulthood. In Beyond Dreamers, sociologists Sofya Aptekar and Amy Hsin examine how undocumented young adults navigate the transition to adulthood.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with a racially and ethnically diverse group of undocumented college students in New York City, with and without DACA authorization, Aptekar and Hsin show that there is no single undocumented experience. They find that while legal status matters enormously, its impacts are influenced by race, national origin, gender, class, sexuality, family resources, educational institutions, neighborhood contexts, and access to local and transnational co-ethnic communities and labor markets. These forces not only shape the kinds of opportunities available to undocumented young adults, but how they choose to approach disclosing their undocumented status and interact with family, peers, employers, professors, and police.

Aptekar and Hsin pay particular attention to the effect of one’s mode of entry into the United States, highlighting the distinction between visa overstayers and those who entered the country without inspection. This highly consequential divide shapes early experiences of illegality, labor market options, exposure to surveillance and precarity, and the possibility of adjusting status. Individuals who overstay their visas have more avenues to adjust their undocumented status, including family sponsorship and marriage to U.S. citizens. Opportunities for legalization are much more restricted for those who made unauthorized border crossings. If these immigrant youth want to adjust their status, they are required to leave the country and remain abroad for at least ten years to do so. Other methods of adjusting their status, such as claiming extreme hardship on their American families or trying to obtain visas for victims of crime or parental abuse or neglect, are extremely difficult to obtain, costly, and can lead to division in families, making legalization all but impossible and, therefore, limiting youths’ opportunities. Thus, mode of entry strongly influences how some young adults imagine their future lives in the U.S. and beyond.

Beyond Dreamers deftly underscores how deeply legal uncertainty continues to structure the lives of undocumented young adults.

Randomized experiments—often referred to as the gold standard of research design—are generally accepted as the type of studies that provide the strongest evidence about cause and effect. There has been a wide adoption of experimental methods in agriculture, medicine, industrial design, and laboratory social sciences, such as experimental psychology, where conditions can be controlled. Since then, there has been an increase in the use of field experiments to provide evidence of cause and effect beyond the laboratory. However, the social settings in which these studies take place complicate the design and evaluation of experiments because their social contexts must be taken into account in order for the experiment to provide useful and unambiguous results. In Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences, statistician Larry V. Hedges details how to design educational and social science field experiments that are sensitive enough to provide clear-cut evidence on the effects of social interventions.

Hedges draws on one hundred years of statistical theory and classic experimental design in Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences. Highlighting the social-structural information embedded in field experiments, he links this history with contemporary statistical methods in the social sciences to explain how to design social experiments that are adequately sensitive to determine the influence of an intervention. He covers the four basic research designs—and thirty-nine elaborations of those designs—that are used most often in social experiments while also introducing additional, more complex, designs. He brings together, in the same notation, work on experimental design, design sensitivity, and optimal design of experiments for the most frequently used research designs in education and the social sciences, emphasizing their conceptual consistency. Hedges also discusses the practical problems of how to recruit and maintain a sample throughout the duration of an experiment.

Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences is an essential resource for researchers planning educational and social field experiments and graduate students.

School choice promises to free families from the limits of where they live. The Scarcity Loop asks what happens when that promise is made in school systems where more children seek desirable schools than those schools can serve. Focused on New York City’s high school admissions system, sociologist Jennifer L. Jennings argues that choice becomes another way to ration scarce educational opportunity, shifting where rationing happens, who must manage it, and how families understand the outcomes that follow.

Jennings begins with the admissions process itself. New York City asks every eighth grader to choose from hundreds of options. On paper, the system offers extraordinary possibility. But that possibility still has to be converted into a seat. Someone has to learn the rules, compare schools, manage deadlines, make trips, and decide how much risk a thirteen-year-old can bear. Jennings calls this the work of getting in and shows that the capacity to do that work is not evenly distributed. Some families enter choice systems with the flu-ency and flexibility to turn options into opportunity. Others confront these systems with fewer supports and far less room for error. Some teenagers shoulder decisions with little adult help. Counselors trans-late complicated rules under impossible constraints. Principals are not passive actors: Jennings shows how they recruit and adapt as they try to build, manage demand for, and maintain the reputation of schools that families will choose.

Jennings contends that reforms meant to expand access can reorganize the very competition they aim to resolve. As one barrier recedes, another becomes more consequential. Residence matters less, but advantage does not disappear; it travels through information, timing, and familiarity with the rules. Inequality persists, not because nothing changes, but because advantage finds new points of entry as reforms change rules. As the work of securing opportunity shifts, so do understandings of inequality. Unequal outcomes can come to look less like consequences of how educational opportunities are organized and more like reflections of how families navigate the system.

Drawing on more than 450 interviews, participant observation, administrative data, and archival research, The Scarcity Loop follows students, parents, counselors, and principals as they navigate school choice at scale. Jennings traces who must do the work of making choice real, clarifying what is at stake when public education becomes something families must know how to secure.

Despite cultural scripts that continue to view fathers as the primary breadwinners in their families, there has been a striking escalation of mothers’ assumption of that role. Over the last twenty years, the rate at which mothers have become the primary bread-winner has increased by almost 50 percent, and an astonishing 70 percent of American mothers can expect to become the primary earner for their household for at least a year before their first child turns eighteen. In The Motherlode, sociologist Jennifer L. Glass traces the rise of mothers as the primary financial providers for their children, investigates the causes of this increase, and evaluates the consequences of this shift for mothers and families.

Glass finds the swift increase of fiscal responsibility for children by their mothers is occurring in households of all racial backgrounds and across the educational spectrum. This increase is not due to more divorces or relationship breakups. In fact, the most rapid growth in mothers’ financial responsibility for the household has come from married mothers, not single mothers, and about half of contemporary mom-breadwinners have spouses or romantic partners living in the home. Nor is it due to a narrowing of the gender pay gap or mothers’ ability to out-earn their partners: The bulk of breadwinning mothers see large financial losses or are better off financially but still living in poverty when they become the primary earner. Instead, this rise is due to broader, long-term changes in the economy, which have led to wage stagnation and less job security for all workers.

The increase in mothers’ financial obligations to their children has occurred at the same time that nonfinancial responsibilities for children have increased: More time is dedicated to identifying, evaluating, and obtaining goods and services for children, including health care and schooling. There has not been a corresponding increase in support for mothers by their employers, the government, or fathers. This leaves mothers with greater burdens of both financial support and nonmonetary care for their children, which increases the number of children that are dependent on their mothers’ earnings and vulnerable to intermittent poverty. While this rise in maternal breadwinning is unlikely to decline anytime soon, Glass suggests policies that could provide mothers with more support, such as enacting labor protections for care occupations dominated by women, legislating federal paid family and medical leave, and providing federally funded, wraparound, non-means-tested systems of childcare.

The Motherlode is an illuminating and in-depth examination of the surprisingly pervasive phenomenon of maternal breadwinning in American society.