Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations? (review)

Despite an ever increasing wage premium associated with a college degree and the large percentage of high school students hoping to attend college, debates about the value of widening access to the bachelor's degree persist. From the beginning of the movement to extend college opportunities to Americans from all family backgrounds, a vocal minority has opposed the effort. Their arguments vary – to some, opening doors offers the risk of overeducation and the devaluation of degrees, while others hesitate to cheapen the college experience by crowding classrooms and demoralizing professors. Whatever the thrust of the argument, a common theme emerges: keep college access at least partially limited, allow in only the most "qualified," but make sure your own children go to college. While often subtle and muted in public discourse, these politics of inequality still pervade American higher education policies and politics.

David Lavin has long been a scholarly advocate for liberalizing college access. Since the City University of New York began its open admissions experiment in the early 1970s, Lavin has endeavored to show that efforts to broaden access to universities and community colleges pay off. Over the decades, he has written about the short- and long-term outcomes of democratizing process – the percent of students finishing a degree who may never have started college, their earnings, employment, etc. Now, in Passing the Torch, he and colleague Paul Attewell examine the much longer-term benefits: the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage. According to Attewell and Lavin, the college graduates from CUNY's original experiment have passed the "torch" of educational opportunity on to many of their children.

Passing the Torch makes its strongest contribution to the body of research on college access, which has been dominated by empirical analyses of national longitudinal data, rarely having the opportunity to draw the kinds of clear counterfactuals and comparisons made possible by natural or intentional experiments. Attewell and Lavin make a major contribution by expanding the analysis of college outcomes to include achievement by children of college graduates. Their results raise questions about the wisdom of concluding longitudinal studies after only six or eight years, as is common in the education programs at the National Center for Education Statistics. This book should be required reading for all contemporary courses on higher education policy.

But if it was intended to document and explain effects of maternal education, this book does not fully succeed. Certainly, the authors bring together a cogent summary of existing research on the topic to motivate their analyses, but their empirical work neither identifies new answers to old questions nor generates new questions. We need to know more about the precise mechanisms through which maternal education affects child outcomes, which requires a more systematic approach than simply estimating an effect of maternal education on an intermediate outcome (e.g., warmth or cognitive functioning in the home), and then estimating the effect of that outcome on children's educational attainment. We need to know the extent to which maternal education has direct effects as well as the extent of indirect effects, and which mechanisms have the most explanatory power. Without that, the analysis begins and ends with the same laundry list of ways in which maternal education might matter for children.

Another difficulty with the book arises from what I suspect was an internal struggle over how to best write public sociology. It is clear from the start that the "point of this book is political," as Attewell stated in an Author Meets Critics session at the annual American Sociological Association meeting. The authors lay out a clear argument, and marshal as much empirical support as they can muster to support it. They draw conclusions and implications for policy and practice, but spend relatively little time considering alternative explanations or broader lessons for theory. The authors seem to have declined to engage their analysis with research in...