Final Research Proposal
Blog #4
Mind Over Money? Can low-SES students meet the achievement of high-SES peers through hard work and effort alone?
College is supposed the place where you can change your destiny-- a place where you can rise above your upbringing, your color, your age, your gender, and become successful. If you study hard, you will succeed. Sounds simple enough right? As I grew older, I quickly realized that the simplicity of that statement came with a tangled web of exceptions. In my sophomore year at Rutgers, I took a class called ‘Sociological Analysis of Social Problems.’ Growing up, my father had always told me that the biggest indicator of how successful a person will be is how successful that person’s parents are. It wasn’t until my sociology course that I had concrete evidence of this fact. This course, along with a number of other sociology courses that I had enrolled myself in, helped me to understand the distinction between free will and a life that is predetermined. Humans tend to believe that they have complete control over their lives-- that he and he alone has the power to achieve success or is at fault for succumbing to failure, but it is not so black and white. Statistics show that most aspects of our lives, in this country, are predetermined for us based on our own or our parents’ economic status, race/ethnicity, education level, occupation, and the list goes on. For years I have heard people with differing opinions say that someone who is unsuccessful is “lazy” and if someone who grows up poor remains poor throughout adulthood then he or she did not “work hard enough”. These explanations bother me because I know that the explanation is not this clear cut, though many would like to believe so. My purpose of this research paper is to debunk myths like those stated above that unsuccessful or poor people are “lazy” and “do it to themselves”.
The general issue I am addressing in this proposal is how a student’s socioeconomic status affects his or her achievement levels in comparison to students from high socioeconomic backgrounds. It is important to research and understand this issue because once the public recognizes the contribution that differences in SES have on the ever-widening achievement gap, more can be done to reverse this trend.
The research question for my proposal will be ‘What are the ways in which the achievement gap can be narrowed amongst low and high SES students?’and ‘How can we increase the chances for low-SES students to achieve upward social mobility?’ I chose these questions for my proposal because they tie to one another. I believe these questions will be more valuable than, say, asking a question on how a student’s SES status affects his or her chances at success because we already have studies/resources that we can access that show that students from lower SES backgrounds perform more poorly and have fewer chances at upward social mobility, on average. These questions, instead, contain challenges and controversy because there is no clear-cut answer on how to solve this-- it is something that researchers, educators, and government officials have been trying to solve for years. Therefore, through my research, I hope to be able to provide some feasible solutions, or at least which solutions would be the most and least effective.
From the readings provided in class, I will use specific cases for evidence, particularly from the Armstrong and Hamilton readings. I will also use ideas like having a parental “cushion” in terms of financial expenses, the role the government plays in helping low and high-SES students, privatization, and the ‘vampire effect’.
I have identified Armstrong and Hamilton’s case of Emma and Taylor from Midwestern University as evidence for what I am trying to prove. I am going to dissect their subtly different SES backgrounds in an attempt to try to determine what caused one woman to be more successful than the other? What ultimately limited one from making certain decisions that the other did without hesitation?
Additional questions that emerge from my research are, does high-SES make a student lazy and, in turn, perform worse? This is a question that STEMS from my research, and may be addressed, but I am not yet positive. Another question is which specific factors play a role in the decreased levels of achievement for low-SES students? My plan for research is to read through as many studies and academic sources on my topic as possible and outline them. Then, my plan is to connect them to one another, to the readings already covered in class, and back to my research question.
Bibliography
Armstrong, Elizabeth and Laura Hamilton. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains
Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013. Print.
Bellibas, Mehmet Sükrü. "Who Are the Most Disadvantaged? Factors Associated with the
Achievement of Students with Low Socio-Economic Backgrounds." Educational
Sciences: Theory and Practice, vol. 16, no. 2, 01 Apr. 2016, pp. 691-710.
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Carlson, Scott. “When College Was a Public Good.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 63.15
(December 2, 2016): A04. Print and Web.
Huang, H. (2015). Can students themselves narrow the socioeconomic-status-based achievement
gap through their own persistence and learning time? Education Policy Analysis
Archives, 23(108), http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v23.1977
Montt, Guillermo. "Are Socioeconomically Integrated Schools Equally Effective for Advantaged
and Disadvantaged Students?." Comparative Education Review, vol. 60, no. 4, 01 Nov.
2016, pp. 808-832. EBSCOhost,
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Nathan, Rebekah. “Student Culture and ‘Liminality.’” My Freshman Year: What a Professor
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