Abstract
It is well established that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are linked to health and emotional outcomes. However, less is known about the relationship between ACEs and educational attainment—a potentially important feature of educational stratification in America. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study following 7–12th grade students in the 1994–95 school year, I investigate the link between ACEs and these students’ timely post-secondary attainment. I also explore the role of health and socio-emotional factors as mediators. Results confirm that there is a graded relationship between ACEs and timely bachelor’s degree attainment—an additional ACE decreases the odds of timely bachelor’s degree attainment by about 17%, even after accounting for other related factors. In addition, the findings suggest that general health partially mediates this link.
Highlights
Traditional sociological explanations of educational attainment and achievement have focused on the role of ascription such as age, gender, and race in generating inequality (Grusky and Weisshaar 2014), and it has long been recognized that social-psychological factors likely influence the gap in educational outcomes (Sewell et al 1969)
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) score mean is around 2, which is higher than the ACE data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study (CDC n.d.) and higher than the same age segment in Felitti et al (1998)
In what I think is the first national assessment, I find that ACEs are significantly associated with timely bachelor’s degree attainment
Summary
Traditional sociological explanations of educational attainment and achievement have focused on the role of ascription such as age, gender, and race in generating inequality (Grusky and Weisshaar 2014), and it has long been recognized that social-psychological factors likely influence the gap in educational outcomes (Sewell et al 1969). The ecobiodevelopmental framework points to early traumatic childhood experiences —exposure to toxic stress—as fundamentally changing neurobiological processes that impact child development and other life outcomes (Danese and McEwen 2012; Shonkoff 2012; Shonkoff et al 2009). One such lens from which to study cumulative impact of childhood and socialpsychological factors is ACEs—a scale measuring exposure to negative child experiences from birth to about age 18 including abuse, neglect, and dysfunctional home environments. Exploring the role that ACEs has to educational attainment highlights the significance of non-school factors in educational attainment and contributes to how virtual in-home learning during the COVID-19 pandemic might impact student learning when children are experiencing adversity at home
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