Educational Practices to Identify And Support Students Experiencing Homelessness
Category: Student Well-Being
This study investigates how school-level variation contributes to social stratification even before labor market entry by examining Career and Technical Education (CTE) as a key mechanism for sorting students into pathways with unequal economic returns. Using Delaware administrative data and Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational wage data, we introduce “expected wage” as a measure to quantify inequality in CTE pathways by analyzing how student demographics influence selection into pathways with different expected wages. Multilevel mixed-effects modeling reveals substantial wage gaps across student subgroups, systematically channeling disadvantaged students into lower-wage pathways. Decomposition analyses show gender expected wage gaps stem from within-school factors, while racial and socioeconomic gaps arise from between-school differences. Student segregation into programs contributes more to these inequalities than schools' program offerings. The findings advance our understanding of novel mechanisms for the generation of educational inequality across and within schools.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/gz36-de58
