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Despite growth in the number of Latino students enrolled in U.S. colleges, foreign-born Latinos are less likely than both native-born Latinos and other immigrant groups to graduate. However, it is difficult to understand the lower educational attainment of Latino immigrants without considering variation in enrollment by legal status. After all, until recently, undocumented immigrants have been blocked from higher education in the United States. Drawing upon the education and immigrant illegality literature, as well as longitudinal administrative data on 35,400 college students, we examine the association between students' legal status and their educational achievement, or GPA-an important predictor of educational attainment. We find that, despite high achievement in high school and upon first enrolling in college, undocumented students do not experience upward achievement over time, otherwise known in the education literature as educational progression. Rather, their growth is flat, and their level of achievement declines slightly, what we call an educational regression, relative to their documented and foreign-born citizen Latino peers. We identify several individual- and structural-level factors that help explain the pattern and timing of undocumented student regression. The results have implications for studies of immigrant inequality, incorporation, and immigration law in the U.S. and globally.

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Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the first large-scale immigration policy to affect undocumented immigrants in the United States in decades and offers eligible undocumented youth temporary relief from deportation as well as renewable work permits. Although DACA has improved the economic conditions and mental health of undocumented immigrants, we do not know how DACA improves the social mobility of undocumented immigrants through its effect on educational attainment. We use administrative data on students attending a large public university to estimate the effect of DACA on undocumented students' educational outcomes. The data are unique because they accurately identify students' legal status, account for individual heterogeneity, and allow separate analysis of students attending community colleges versus four-year colleges. Results from difference-in-difference estimates demonstrate that as a temporary work permit program, DACA incentivizes work over educational investments but that the effect of DACA on educational investments depends on how easily colleges accommodate working students. At four-year colleges, DACA induces undocumented students to make binary choices between attending school full-time and dropping out of school to work. At community colleges, undocumented students have the flexibility to reduce course work to accommodate increased work hours. Overall, the results suggest that the precarious and temporary nature of DACA creates barriers to educational investments.

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We assess life-course changes in how cognitive and noncognitive skills mediate the effect of parental SES on children's academic achievement using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Our results show: (1) the direct effect of parental SES declines while the mediating effect of skills increases over time; (2) cognitive and non-cognitive skills differ in their temporal sensitivities to parental origin; and (3) in contrast to the effect of cognitive skills, the mediating effect of non-cognitive skills increases over time because non-cognitive skills are more sensitive to changes in parental SES. Our results offer insights into the dynamic role skill formation play in status attainment.

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Using longitudinal cohort studies from Australia and the United States, we assess the pervasiveness of the Asian academic advantage by documenting White-Asian differences in verbal development from early to middle childhood. In the United States, Asian children begin school with higher verbal scores than Whites, but their advantage erodes over time. The initial verbal advantage of Asian American children is partly due to their parent's socioeconomic advantage and would have been larger had it not been for their mother's English deficiency. In Australia, Asian children have lower verbal scores than Whites at age 4, but their scores grow a faster rate and converge towards those of Whites by age 8. The initial verbal disadvantage of Asian Australian children is partly due to their mother's English deficiency and would have been larger had it not been for their Asian parent's educational advantage. Asian Australian children's verbal scores grow at a faster pace, in part, because of their parent's educational advantage.

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This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children's time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children's time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better "quality" of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children's development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children's development. Stratification by mothers' education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother's education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and child care. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children's time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.

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The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans' advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian-white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

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Time diaries of sibling pairs from the PSID-CDS are used to determine whether maternal time investments compensate for or reinforce birth-weight differences among children. The findings demonstrate that the direction and degree of differential treatment vary by mother's education. Less-educated mothers devote more total time and more educationally oriented time to heavier-birth-weight children, whereas better-educated mothers devote more total and more educationally oriented time to lower-birth-weight children. The compensating effects observed among highly educated mothers are substantially larger than the reinforcing effects among the least-educated mothers. The findings show that families redistribute resources in ways that both compensate for and exacerbate early-life disadvantages.

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How do maternal work conditions, such as psychological stress and physical hazards, affect children's development? Combining data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Occupational Information Network allows us to shed some light on this question. We employ various techniques including OLS with extensive controls, a value added approach and individual fixed effects in order to address potential endogeneity problems. Our results reveal that mothers' exposure to work-related hazards negatively affects children's cognitive development and to work-related stress negatively affects children's behavioral development. While maternal time investments play a small but significant role in mediating these negative associations, paternal time investments neither reinforce nor compensate these associations.