Monday, May 19, 2025

Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline

 Going to college has consistently conferred a large wage premium. This study shows that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans has halved since 1960. 

The authors decompose this steady rise in ‘collegiate regressivity’ using dozens of survey and administrative datasets documenting 1900–2020 wage premiums and the composition and value-added of collegiate institutions and majors. Three factors explain 80 percent of collegiate regressivity's growth. 

First, the teaching-oriented public universities where lower-income students are concentrated have relatively declined in funding, retention, and economic value since 1960. 

Second, lower-income students have been disproportionately diverted into community and for-profit colleges since 1980 and 1990, respectively. 

Third, higher-income students' falling humanities enrollment and rising computer science enrollment since 2000 have increased their degrees' value. Selection into college-going and across four-year universities are second-order. 

College-going provided equitable returns before 1960, but collegiate regressivity now curtails higher education's potential to reduce inequality and mediates 25 percent of intergenerational income transmission.

Results of College Course Shutouts

 What happens when college students cannot enroll in the courses they want? Using conditional random assignment to oversubscribed courses at a large public university, this study finds that a course shutout reduces the probability that a student ever takes any course in the corresponding subject by 30%. 

Course shutouts are particularly disruptive for female students, reducing women's cumulative GPAs, probability of majoring in STEM, on-time graduation, and early-career earnings. In contrast, shutouts do not appear to be disruptive to male students' long-run outcomes, with one exception—shutouts significantly increase the probability that men choose a major from the business school.

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Cyberbullying in any form can be traumatizing for kids


As concern grows over adolescent mental health, a new national study adds to the growing body of research showing that cyberbullying should be considered an adverse childhood experience (ACE) – a category of childhood trauma linked to long-term emotional, psychological and physical harm.

While many assume that only extreme forms of online harassment – like threats or identity-based attacks – can cause significant harm, the findings suggest a more troubling reality: even less visible or indirect forms of cyberbullying can have equally damaging effects.

With more than 30% of students facing bullying globally, this is particularly alarming in the digital age, where cyberbullying is widespread and exacerbated by factors such as social media and online interactions. 

The study, conducted by Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, investigated the link between cyberbullying and trauma in a nationally-representative sample of 2,697 middle and high school students (ages 13 to 17) in the United States.

Researchers investigated the relationship between the prevalence of 18 different types of cyberbullying, including exclusion (being left out of an online group chat); impersonation (e.g., creating fake social media accounts in someone else’s name); and stalking behaviors (e.g., being tracked or monitored after the victim told the aggressor to stop) – and symptoms of PTSD.

The study also explored how demographic factors like age, sex and socioeconomic status influence the severity of psychological outcomes, identifying which groups of youth may be especially vulnerable.

Results, published in the latest issue of BMC Public Health, reveal that cyberbullying is both widespread and strongly linked to a validated nine-item Post Traumatic Stress clinical scale. What was especially striking was that exclusion and rejection, often dismissed as less serious, were just as trauma-inducing as explicit threats to one’s physical safety. Likewise, being the subject of gossip or cruel online comments had an emotional toll comparable to being harassed for personal traits like one’s race or religion.

“As our research clearly shows, cyberbullying in any form – whether it’s exclusion from a group chat or direct threats – can lead to significant trauma in youth,” said Sameer Hinduja, Ph.D., lead author, a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice within FAU’s College of Social Work and Criminal Justice, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. “We were surprised to find that no single type of cyberbullying caused more harm than others; all carried a similar risk of traumatic outcomes. This means we can’t afford to dismiss or trivialize certain behaviors as ‘less serious’ – being left out or targeted by rumors can be just as detrimental as more overt attacks.”

Findings challenge common assumptions that only the most extreme cases of cyberbullying lead to psychological damage and spotlight the importance of understanding the unique lived experiences of each target. In reality, the emotional impact of online mistreatment – regardless of the form it takes – can deeply affect a young person’s sense of safety, identity and well-being depending on personal factors, situational context, and the strength of support from adults, institutions and peers.

Among the different forms of online harassment, indirect forms were the most common. More than half of the surveyed students reported being the target of mean or hurtful comments or rumors, and a similar number said they were deliberately excluded from group chats or texts. Notably, almost 9 in 10 (87%) experienced at least one of the 18 forms of victimization, underscoring the increasing ubiquity of digital aggression and its normative presence when youth interact online.  

When the researchers analyzed how cyberbullying relates to trauma, they found that girls and younger teens were more likely to experience higher levels of traumatic symptoms than boys or older teens. However, once they factored in how much cyberbullying each student had experienced, these demographic differences became less important.

“What mattered most was the overall amount of cyberbullying: the more often a student was targeted, the more trauma symptoms they showed,” said Hinduja. “In fact, cyberbullying alone accounted for a significant portion – 32% – of the differences in trauma levels among students.”

The study findings highlight the need for further research on protective factors, such as strong family support, close friendships and emotional resilience, which may buffer against the negative effects of interpersonal victimization in online spaces. The researchers also highlight the importance of understanding whether these impacts fade over time or persist in adulthood.

“To truly protect young people, we must take a trauma-informed approach, one that prioritizes emotional and psychological safety, incorporates grounding techniques, and includes strong crisis intervention plans,” said Hinduja. “This requires training educators, counselors and youth-serving adults to recognize signs of trauma, understand its root causes, and respond with empathy, emotional safety protocols and scientifically proven mindfulness interventions. Equally important is creating safe environments where students feel supported and seen, and where even subtle forms of bullying are taken seriously given the potentially serious outcomes that compromise youth well-being.”

Friday, May 16, 2025

Meta-analysis: Examining the Academic Effects of Cross-Age Tutoring

 Cross-age tutoring is an educational model where an older tutor is paired with a younger tutee, valued for its economic advantages and capacity to engage participants. This model leads to improvements in both academic performance and behavior, as evidenced by Shenderovich et al. (International Journal of Educational Research, 76, 190–21 2016) meta-analysis, which reported statistically significant positive effects across various educational settings and demographic groups. In this study, we aimed to update this previous meta-analysis by systematically examining 32 studies on cross-age tutoring. In our updated meta-analysis, we observed a small to moderate positive effect on academic outcomes for both tutors and tutees. The overall effect size was 0.34, with tutees benefiting at 0.33 and tutors at 0.39. Our moderator analyses revealed no significant differences in impact from the number of sessions, tutor type, tutee risk status, or subject area. These findings highlight the broad applicability and effectiveness of cross-age tutoring, particularly emphasizing the benefits of using older students as tutors in resource-limited settings. Further research is recommended to explore additional influencing factors.

Complete report

The Impact of Tutor Gender Match on Girls’ STEM Interest, Engagement, and Performance

 

Persistent gender disparities in STEM fields, even when young girls perform as well in STEM in school as boys, highlight the potential importance of preconceived views of STEM work in these difference and the potential need for role models to upend these views. 

This stud investigates whether female math tutors positively influence girls’ STEM interest, attendance, and math performance, randomly assigning 422 ninth grade students taking Algebra 1 in an urban New England school district to either same-gender or opposite-gender tutors. 

Girls paired with female tutors reported significantly higher STEM interest (0.73 SD) compared to those assigned to male tutors and were more likely to pass the course with a C- or better (3.9 percentage points). There was no evidence that students’ attendance patterns systematically differed based on their tutors’ gender. The effects appear stronger for students working with tutors in-person, as opposed to virtually, and during the school day, as opposed to after school. 

As the first experimental study of the impact of the tutor-student gender match, the research provides evidence that pairing girls with female tutors in school can enhance girls' STEM self-concept and academic performance.

Boys Outperform Girls in Middle School STEM, Reversing Gender Gap

KEY FINDINGS 

• Boys’ historic advantage in math and science, which had been eliminated by 2019, markedly returned during the post-COVID period. Similar patterns were not observed in reading, where girls continue to outperform boys. 

• High-achieving boys significantly outperformed high-achieving girls in math and science, but lowachieving boys underperformed low-achieving girls. 

• The share of girls enrolled in algebra in eighth grade dropped by two percentage points between 2019 and 2024 (from 26.4 to 24.5 percent), while the share of boys remained level at 24 percent. 

In the last two decades, the US has made remarkable strides in closing long-standing gender inequities in academic achievement in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. By 2019, data from an international math and science assessment, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), showed that the historic advantage eighth-grade boys held in math and science achievement had largely disappeared. However, new data suggest these hard-won gains may be unraveling. During the COVID-19 pandemic, girls showed substantially larger declines in math and science (both in the US and globally). The STEM gender gaps that took a decade or more to close were reopened in just a few years. 

 Relying on a single assessment given every four years obscures when these setbacks began, whether this pattern holds equally among low- and high-achieving students, and whether similar trends play out across other key indicators of STEM education (e.g., course enrollments). To better understand how STEM gender gaps have evolved during and after the pandemic, we first used five years of data from three national assessments (TIMSS, the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], and the MAP® Growth™ assessment from NWEA®) to estimate trends in gender gaps in eighth grade over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.


FULL REPORT

Thursday, May 15, 2025

New study raises concerns about the safety of long-term ADHD medication treatment in children

 

A recent study by the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki in Finland and the Finnish Social Insurance Institution Kela reveals that the average duration of ADHD medication for children and adolescents is more than three years. However, reliable, controlled data on the safety of marketed ADHD medicines in children are available for only one year of follow-up. 

The use of ADHD medication has increased notably in recent years, but its long-term effects in children have not been sufficiently studied, despite years of use. A recent population-based register study found that the average duration of ADHD medication treatment for Finnish children and adolescents was over three years. In the quarter of children with the longest duration of ADHD medication treatment, the treatment lasted more than seven years.

“This is an important research opening, as the duration of long-term use of ADHD medication in children and adolescents in everyday life has only been studied to a very limited extent,” says the study lead Päivi Ruokoniemi, a Specialist in both Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and Child Psychiatry from the University of Helsinki.

Boys treated more often and for longer periods

The study found that both gender and the age at which ADHD medication is started have a significant effect on the duration of treatment. On average, ADHD treatment lasted just over a year longer for boys than for girls. For both genders, an early age of onset led to longer medication treatment.

The longest duration of ADHD medication was for boys who started medication at the age of 6–8 years. The median duration of their medication treatment was 6.3 years, and for a quarter of them the treatment lasted more than 9.4 years. This group was also the largest group to start ADHD medication. Boys aged 6 to 8 accounted for 32.4 percent of the study subjects.

“Our research shows that a significant proportion of young children, especially boys, are on ADHD medication for years, throughout their comprehensive school years. In this context, it is worrying that reliable research data on the safety of these medicines is only available for a follow-up period of up to one year. After all, we are talking about children at a very sensitive stage of development," says Ruokoniemi.

Studies on long-term effects lacking

The most reliable evidence for the safety of medicines comes from clinical, controlled, and randomised trials. For the regulatory approval of ADHD medications, the European Medicines Agency requires pharmaceutical companies to establish clinical safety with a study covering at least one year of follow-up.

“The long-term effects of ADHD medicines have been studied extensively in various observational and uncontrolled research settings, but these are always prone to confounding and therefore do not provide reliable information on cause-and-effect relationships,” continues Ruokoniemi.

“Due to these uncertainties, it is important that ADHD medication is only started when non-pharmacological treatments have been deemed insufficient. Even in this case, it must be ensured that both the caregiver and the child, in accordance with the child’s age and level of development, have access to sufficient information on the expected benefits and harms of the medicine and the uncertainties associated with them.”

The researchers also recommend that the need for ADHD medication that has already been started should be reviewed annually by a medical doctor.

The descriptive register study, recently published in the journal European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, was carried out as a research collaboration between the Universities of Turku and Helsinki and the Finnish Social Insurance Institution Kela. The data used in the study was from the register of dispensations reimbursable under the National Health Insurance Scheme for the years 2008–2019. The data included nearly 41,000 children and young people who had started medication treatment in Finland. The duration of medication treatment was estimated using Kaplan-Meier survival analysis.

In 2019, the last year of the study data, the prevalence of ADHD medication was 5–6 percent for boys and 1.3–1.5 percent for girls. Since then, the use of ADHD medication has continued to increase both globally and also in Finland, where the increase has been even faster than in other Nordic countries.

“We know that the proportion of Finnish children and adolescents using ADHD medication in Finland has already doubled since the years we conducted our research," says Ruokoniemi.

The research article was published in the journal European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry on 7 May 2025: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-025-02735-4.