Senior Researchers: Richard Alba (Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY) and Roxane Silberman (Maurice Halbwachs Center, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris)
Research Fellows: Dalia Abdel-Hady (Sociology, Southern Methodist University); Amy Lutz (Sociology and Education, Syracuse University); and Yaël Brinbaum (Sociology and Interdisciplinary Research Institute of Education, University of Burgundy)
The collaboration between Alba and Silberman, will compare France and the US and focus on the transition from the educational system to the labor market. Its goal is to evaluate the labor-market payoff to different educational credentials and thereby to determine whether the far greater variety of school diplomas and credentials available in the French system creates, on balance, advantages or disadvantages for the second generation there by comparison with the US. The young scholars who will participate in this research team, Dalia Abdel-Hady and Amy Lutz, are both at the post-doctoral level. Lutz is a sociologist of education, who already has extensive research experience in studying Mexican Americans' educational outcomes and the role of Spanish-English bilingualism. Abdel-Hady does research on Middle Eastern diasporas and completed her doctoral work with a thesis on Lebanese immigrants in Montreal, New York and Paris. In addition, the project will benefit from the participation of a French post-doctoral fellow, Yaël Brinbaum, who is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, and will investigate the roles of parental and student aspirations and knowledge of the value of different credentials.
The comparison between France and the US gains theoretical purchase from a key difference between the educational systems: the French one offers a wide variety of school-leaving credentials, both at the secondary and tertiary levels, many of which are presumed to have direct value in the labor market as qualifications for specific jobs, while the American system in the main offers very general credentials (until the stage of post-baccalaureate professional training) that are not linked directly to positions in the labor market. Thus, the comparison is motivated by the central questions: in which sort of system do the children of immigrants possess better chances in the labor market? In particular, do the intermediate vocational diplomas obtainable at the secondary-school level in the French system offer a secure route to employment that is absent in the American case? In addition, we will investigate how immigrant families and their children navigate a complex educational system versus a relatively simple one and whether complexity creates problems of inadequate knowledge of options for some newcomer families.
The questions will be examined for the children in immigrant families from two groups that enter the societies at low levels: the Mexicans in the US and the Maghrebins (North Africans) in France; to the extent possible given the data, the research will concentrate on the Algerians and Moroccans, rather than the Tunisians, a more educationally selective immigrant group. The Mexican and Maghrebin immigrants are similar in that both come with low levels of education compared to the natives of the receiving societies and take low-wage positions in the labor market; neither group controls any well-remunerated niches in the labor market that could give employment to group members with limited educational qualifications. Thus, second-generation members of the groups are dependent upon the respective education system to achieve chances for economic advance, but generally speaking their immigrant parents and their communities offer few resources to make high educational attainment likely. In fact, studies in both countries demonstrate that the second generations are much more likely to leave school without any credentials than are members of the majority population.
The project will employ a mixed methodology: most of the analytic work will concentrate on existing and comparable longitudinal data sets in the two countries to build an extensive statistical portrait of the educational aspirations and knowledge of group members and of their labor-market experiences in relation to educational attainment; in-depth interviews will be used to explore the perceptions of the value of educational credentials and of the factors, including discrimination, that have affected labor-market trajectories. The quantitative portion of the project will build on work that Alba and Silberman have already accomplished in collaboration and, in particular, on the experience they have gained in working with longitudinal data sets in the two countries.
Five longitudinal data sets will be deployed for the analysis. The two in the US-the National Education Longitudinal Survey (starting in 1988) and the Add Health Survey (starting in 1994)-will be used in the analysis for both thematic foci-that is, labor-market experiences and aspirations and knowledge. Both data involve baseline surveys of children and parents that occurred while the children were in school and are informative about how parents and students evaluate educational options. Both data sets have tracked young people into their mid-20s and thus for the great majority have collected data about early labor-market experiences. Moreover, both also have oversampled either Mexicans or Latinos, thus guaranteeing that we will have large enough samples of second-generation Mexicans for adequate analysis.
We will draw on three French data sets-Génération 1998 and 2001 and the Educational Panel Survey (started in 1995). The two Génération data sets are large samples of individuals who have left the school system in the survey start years. In the case of the 1998 sample, the school leavers have been interviewed 3, 5 and 7 years afterwards and considerable data about labor-market experiences since the departure from school have been collected; for the 2001 sample, only the data for the first 3 post-school years are now available. In the event, these data sets will give us the ability to link labor-market-experience variables such as length of time to find a job, unemployment and underemployment, to educational certificates. These data also contain information on how individuals view their future prospects on the labor market and perceive the appropriateness of their employment given their educational attainment.
The French Educational Panel Survey is, like the two US data sets, a longitudinal survey that begins with students in secondary school (in this case, students entering the first year of the collège, the lower secondary tier, in 1995). It contains ample information about the aspirations and knowledge of the system on the part of the students and their parents, and since it tracks the educational progress of the students with both administrative and subsequent survey data, it will allow us to relate the aspirations and knowledge data, revealing of immigrant-family educational strategies, to subsequent educational pathways and outcomes, as we can also do in the US. For students who leave the school system relatively early, the latest wave of the survey will be informative about entry into the labor market.
While the analysis of these large-scale, longitudinal data sets will yield a rich picture of the connections of aspirations and knowledge to subsequent educational outcomes and of these to labor-market experiences, we still need some in-depth interviews to generate information that cannot be gleaned from statistical analysis alone. In the interviews with second-generation Mexicans and North Africans, we will seek to find out about such matters as: perceptions of future prospects and evaluations of current position on the labor market; experiences with discrimination at the hands of employers; and assessments of the value of educational credentials earned. We anticipate carrying out about 25 interviews in each country, limiting our samples to individuals whose educational attainments are in the middle of the range of possibilities. (That is, we will eliminate those who have left school without a credential since they are condemned to the bottom of the labor market; and we will also exclude those who have achieved university degrees equivalent to the BA or better in the US.) In each country, we will draw interviews from two sites, one an area of high group concentration (a barrio in the US, an immigrant suburb in France) and one a more mixed area. These sites have yet to be selected in France, but in the US we will take advantage of Dalia Abdel-Hady's location at SMU to do the interviews in the Dallas area.
The division of labor takes advantage of the prior research experiences and interests of the fellows. Amy Lutz, who already has analyzed Mexican-American educational attainment in the NELS data, will concentrate on the quantitative analysis of the transition from school to the labor market. During the summer of 2006, she will begin developing the required variables in NELS; to be noted in this respect is that the analysis will pay attention to relatively fine distinctions in educational attainments in the US system, such as whether a high school diploma is earned on time or not and whether the GED is substituted for a diploma earned at a high school. She will also acquire the Add Health data and begin a comparable construction of variables. In September 2006, she will move to Paris and begin working with the French Génération data sets, at first to construct equivalent measures. Yaël Brinbaum will be in France during the fall and will assist Lutz to begin working effectively at the Halbwachs Center and to become familiar with the French data sets. Roxane Silberman will also be available to work with Lutz.
During the late summer and fall, the three fellows, with guidance from Alba and Silberman, will work on the construction of the questionnaire for the in-depth interviews. We anticipate that this process will be complete by mid-fall and that Dalia Abdel-Hady, who will have the main responsibility for carrying out these interviews, will conduct some pilot interviews with Mexican Americans in the Dallas area. In January 2007, Abdel-Hady will move to Paris to conduct interviews with second-generation North Africans. Silberman will assist her in the identification of appropriate sites and also in obtaining initial respondents who will be the seeds for a snowball sample. The interviews with Mexican Americans will then be completed when Abdel-Hady returns to Dallas in September 2007. Lutz, who already has experience in interviewing Mexican Americans in the Dallas area, may assist in this process.
Yaël Brinbaum, who will spend time in Paris with Lutz during fall 2006 and learn then about the US data sets, will come to Albany in January 2007 to work with Alba, at the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (CSDA). Her task will be to conduct analyses of the educational aspirations and knowledge of the system possessed by second-generation students and their parents and the impacts on eventual attainment. She already has extensive experience in analyzing relevant data from the Educational Panel Survey in France; and in the US she will work with the NELS and Add Health data. CSDA already has these data sets and possesses a confidential data room, where the restricted versions of the data sets can be analyzed. Brinbaum will also be able to draw upon the extensive knowledge of both data sets possessed by Professor Katherine Schiller of Albany, who is also in residence at CSDA.
It is anticipated that the fellows will be engaged in some writing by the end of the second year of the project, but most of their writing will take place during their third and fourth years. They will be encouraged to write independently of the senior investigators, but it is almost certain that small groups of convenience, including possibly one or both senior investigators, will form to write come papers. The entire team is responsible for an overview paper of the results that will appear in a project volume.
