Growing up in a poor neighborhood can sharply reduce a child’s chances of graduating from high school, according to a study in this month’s American Sociological Review.
A pair of researchers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor drew on data from a longitudinal study of more than 2,000 children. They found that being raised in a neighborhood with high poverty and unemployment cuts the likelihood of high school graduation from 96 percent to 76 percent for black children, and from 95 percent to 85 percent for white children. And the longer a child lives in that kind of neighborhood, the study says, the more harmful the effect.
