On The Edge Of Commitment: Educational Attainment And Race In The United States

"On the Edge of Commitment is a provocative assessment of how young people decide how far to go in school. Morgan advances a novel and technically sophisticated synthesis of socialization and rational choice perspectives on educational attainment, and sets out a promising agenda for the next generation of educational stratification research."--Robert D. Mare, University of California, Los Angeles
"An understanding of processes of educational attainment is of ever-increasing importance in contemporary societies. Morgan's book presents a new approach, integrating the best of previous work with highly original ideas of his own, and admirably demonstrating how sociological imagination can be combined with theoretical rigor."--John Goldthorpe, Oxford University

The importance of educational certification for labor market success has increased since the 1970s. But social sciences still cannot answer a fundamental question: Who goes to college and why? In "On the Edge of Commitment," Stephen L. Morgan offers a new model of educational achievement to explain why some students are committed to preparation for college.
Morgan's model unites in one common framework the forward-looking cost-benefit assessments of students with social influence processes. The model is then used to explain puzzling race differences in patterns of high school achievement and subsequent rates of college enrollment. The book, using this model, makes a major theoretical statement on the process of educational achievement, which will help to launch a new generation of empirical work.