Diverging Pathways

Book excerpt: Social arrangements of society's institutions deflect people's achievement patterns. Some schools take only talented students, others take the rest; within schools, students are separated into ability groups. Firms are in different industries and vary in size. During their educational and work careers, people get sorted into these different locations. Diverging Pathways examines that sorting process and shows how it affects people's achievements. Some locations accelerate achievements, others depress them - in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary school programs, and in the labor force. Most important, some people are consistently in the same kinds of locations, repeatedly advantaged or disadvantaged, especially in school. They end up far apart as adults, due in large part to the cumulative effects of the social arrangements they passed through. Diverging Pathways follows the members of a 1958 British birth cohort for the first twenty-three years of their lives. It presents a detailed picture of their family backgrounds and their school and early labor force experiences and achievements. Besides the cumulative effects of institutional locations, it shows major career differences of men and women, and it describes how the interface between postsecondary education and the labor force alters some of the outcomes of elementary and secondary schooling.