REU Student, Evangeleen Pattison, Awarded Best Undergraduate Paper at 2009 SDA Meeting

Evangeleen Pattison, 2009 REU student, received the award for best undergraduate paper at the annual meeting of the Southern Demographic Association (SDA), held recently in Galveston, Texas.

Ms. Pattison (City University of New York) was a participant of the 2009 Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Minority Group Demography. She was mentored by PRC Graduate Trainee, Andrea Henderson and PRC faculty research associates, Robert Hummer and Art Sakamoto. The program is primarily funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Over the summer, students are expected to develop a research project and to produce a scholarly paper on a topic of their choosing. Currently, Ms. Pattison is a senior studying sociology at CUNY with plans to continue on to graduate school.

Her paper, entitled “The Impact of Parental Education on Degree Completion Among U.S. Adults” uses nationally representative data from MIDUS I, to gauge the links between parental education and post secondary degree completion among U.S. adults. Statistics released by the U.S. Department of Education estimate that in the year 2018, the number of people accruing masters’ and doctorate degrees will have increased by 99.7% and 109.3%, respectively since 1998. Unfortunately, higher levels of educational attainment are not evenly visible across class and racial lines. In order to begin to explore this unequal distribution of degrees, Evangeleen framed her paper using Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory and analyzed the effects of parental education while stratifying for age cohort to measure if the role of parental education is stronger among the younger age cohort. This finding would suggest that the expansion has not increased access and opportunity but has heightened methods of stratification and exclusion. Her key findings include: (1) there is a positive relationship between parental education and degree completion, (2) the relationship between parental education and degree conferment becomes stronger as the degree becomes more advanced; and (3) the relationship between parental education and degree completion is stronger among the younger age cohort.