Models of College Entry in the United States and the Challenges of Estimating Primary and Secondary Effects

In recent work in the sociology of education, the primary effects of stratification are defined as the effects of social class origins on preparation for future educational attainment. The secondary effects are then the net direct effects of social class on the transition to the next higher level of education, which are interpreted as average effects of class conditions on students’ choices. In this article, the standard model of primary and secondary effects is laid out in explicit form, and primary and secondary effects are then estimated for college entry among recent high school graduates in the United States. The challenges of estimating these effects for educational transitions in the United States are then explained, focusing on the weak warrant for causal inference that is used to justify the calculation of counterfactual net differences across classes. Alternative estimates of associational primary and secondary effects are then offered, after which the prospects for the identification of causal secondary effects by conditioning on additional confounders are assessed. In conclusion, an appeal is made for attention to the policy-relevant patterns of heterogeneity that research on primary and secondary effects may be able to reveal, and a case is made for elaboration and direct identification of the presupposed choice mechanism that has been assumed to generate secondary effects in past research.