L T Hamilton
Biographic Data
| ID | 32461 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L T Hamilton |
| GIVEN NAMES | L T |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamilton |
| SIGNATURE | HAMILTON L T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Merced |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0656-7185 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 715 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Hidden Advantage along the Pipeline
Research shows a link between wealth and educational attainment, but little work has examined wealth relationships from high school degree through graduate degree completion. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to study when and how wealth may advantage students along their entire educational trajectory. Using sequential logistic regression models (“Mare models”), we find that across transitions, wealth relationships a…
Wealth, Race, and Under-Addressed Financial Need in Federal Student Aid Policy
Federal student aid formulas prioritize income over wealth. Using nationally representative data from two cohorts, we argue that federal student aid policy thus under-addresses wealth-driven financial need and that this oversight contributes to racial disparities in student debt, in turn reinforcing the United States’s longstanding racial wealth stratification. Our analyses show that Black and Latine students are disproportionately likely to be l…
White Flight in Public Higher Education? Racial Avoidance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions
Latine college students in the United States face increasing isolation in universities designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). We contend that this pattern is not just a function of Latine selection into particular universities. Using enrollment data for public four-year undergraduate institutions from 1990 to 2019, we show that White student enrollment declines after universities cross the 25 percent Latine threshold and become desig…
It's Complicated
The sexual and romantic activities of unmarried women at midlife are often invisible in survey research based on normative categories of adult intimacy. However, women at this stage in the life course are structurally positioned to innovate with intimacy. In our interviews with 53 Black and white women between ages 33-58, outside of stable partnerships, and open to sex and intimacy with men, we find that women's frustration with marriage and marr…
The For-Profit Side of Public U
Online enrollments in public universities have soared, in part because of universities' increasing reliance on for-profit online program managers (OPMs) for everything from instructional design to student recruitment. However, scholarship has indicated that OPMs may play a role in producing predatory forms of inclusion in higher education for marginalized students. To identify mechanisms through which this might occur, the authors conduct a mixed…
Racialized Horizontal Stratification in US Higher Education
In this review, we integrate three bodies of scholarship-education stratification research, political-historical sociology of higher education, and sociological theories of race and racism-to understand the production of 'separate and unequal' postsecondary experiences for racially marginalized college students in the United States. We argue that the US postsecondary system is plural, heterogeneous, and stratified partly as a result of hundreds o…
“Diversity is a corporate plan”
Drawing on ninety-four interviews with university employees at two four-year publics, we identify elements of the “racialized equity labor”, or efforts to challenge racial inequities in the university environment, primarily undertaken by employees of color. We argue that the amount and intensity of racialized equity labor is related to organizational logics of race, or cultural values and beliefs about race that people use to organize their activ…
Tolerable Suboptimization
We argue that the public defunding of public higher education and turn to private revenue streams—for example, non-resident tuition, grants, philanthropy, and corporate sponsorship—generates organizational racial resource disparities. We draw on a year-long qualitative case study of a University of California campus with a majority Latinx and low-income student body, including ethnographic observations and interviews with administrators, staff, a…
Classed Pathways to Marriage
Objective: This article identifies mechanisms through which social class background shapes the marital outcomes of college-going white American women. Background: Scholars are interested in the relative influences of ascriptive and achieved characteristics on mate selection. Research indicates that social class background continues to influence the marriage patterns of college-educated Americans but does not identify the mechanisms through which …
The Stigma of ADHD
Despite the increasing prevalence of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), little sociological research has focused on effects of diagnosis in schools. This study, which is grounded in the modified labeling approach, relies on three waves of Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K:2011) data to determine if teachers evaluate the academic performance of ADHD students as less promising than non-diagnosed peers. Results indicate that t…
Parents, Partners, and Professions
with family resources and motivations, as well as the larger socio-economic context. In addition, not all projects-even if successfully executed-led to the same level of economic security
Racialized Equity Labor, University Appropriation and Student Resistance
We coin the term 'racialized equity labor' to describe the often uncompensated efforts of people of color to address systematic racism and racial marginalization within organizations. Using a year-long ethnographic and interview study of a majority-minority public university, we focus specifically on the racialized equity labor of college students who, like many faculty and staff of color, often labor to make their campuses comfortable and functi…
Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination
We examine how two sociological traditions account for the role of femininities in social domination. The masculinities tradition theorizes gender as an independent structure of domination; consequently, femininities that complement hegemonic masculinities are treated as passively compliant in the reproduction of gender. In contrast, Patricia Hill Collins views cultural ideals of hegemonic femininity as simultaneously raced, classed, and gendered…
Going Greek
Social scientists have long recognized that college students from lower-income households have lower college completion rates than their more affluent peers who are attending the very same schools. Yet parsing the mechanisms through which relative socioeconomic disadvantage and privilege influence college completion has been difficult. This paper leverages a novel dataset comprising information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Sys…
Making the Case for Financial Aid 2.0
Providing a ''Leg Up
Although higher education scholars are increasingly exploring disparities within institutions, they have yet to examine how parental involvement contributes to social-class variation in students' experiences. We ask, what role do parents play in producing divergent college experiences for students from different class backgrounds? Relying on interviews with 41 families, including mothers, fathers, and their daughters, we find that affluent parent…
Parenting to a Degree
Implications of Changing Family Forms for Children
This paper explores what it means to do a sociology of families, that is, one that acknowledges and considers a wider array of family forms than typically has been explored. We begin by reviewing the existing sociological research on a range of alternative family forms, ultimately focusing on older-parent, adoptive, same-sex, and multiracial families. We describe and critically assess four theoretical approaches to examining family forms-family s…
Good Girls
Women's participation in slut shaming is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures. In this article we synthesize insights from social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate women use slut stigma to draw boundaries around status groups linked to s…
The Revised MRS
Using an ethnographic and longitudinal interview study of college women and in-depth interviews with their parents, I argue that mid-tier flagship universities still push women toward gender complementarity-a gender-traditional model of economic security pairing a career oriented man with a financially dependent woman. Combining multilevel and intersectional theories, I show that the infrastructure and campus peer culture at Midwest University su…
Paying for the Party
In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.
More Is More or More Is Less? Parental Financial Investments during College
Evidence shows that parental financial investments increase college attendance, but we know little about how these investments shape postsecondary achievement. Two theoretical frameworks suggest diametric conclusions. Some studies operate from a more-is-more perspective in which children use calculated parental allocations to make academic progress. In contrast, a more-is-less perspective, rooted in a different model of rational behavior, suggest…
Marital Name Change as a Window into Gender Attitudes
The need to revise scholars' approach to the measurement of gender attitudes-long dominated by the separate-spheres paradigm-is growing increasingly timely as women's share of the labor force approaches parity with men's. Recent years have seen revived interest in marital name change as a gendered practice with the potential to aid in this task; however, scholars have yet to test its effectiveness as one possible indicator of gender attitudes. In…
Is Hooking Up Bad for Young Women?
“Girls can't be guys in matters of the heart, even though they think they can,” says Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: HowYoung Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, published in 2007. In her view, “hooking up”—casual sexual activity ranging from kissing to intercourse—places women at risk of “low self-esteem, depression, alcoholism, and eating disorders.” Stepp is only one of half a dozen journalists currently engaged in the bu…
Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood
Current work on hooking up-or casual sexual activity on college campuses-takes an individualistic, 'battle of the sexes' approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women's sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs abou…
Good Girls
Women's participation in slut shaming is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures. In this article we synthesize insights from social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate women use slut stigma to draw boundaries around status groups linked to s…
Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood
Current work on hooking up-or casual sexual activity on college campuses-takes an individualistic, 'battle of the sexes' approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women's sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs abou…
Sexual Assault on Campus
This article explains why rates of sexual assault remain high on college campuses. Data are from a study of college life at a large midwestern university involving nine months of ethnographic observation of a women's floor in a “party dorm,” in-depth interviews with 42 of the floor residents, and 16 group interviews with other students. We show that sexual assault is a predictable outcome of a synergistic intersection of processes operating at in…
Adoptive Parents, Adaptive Parents
Contemporary legal and scholarly debates emphasize the importance of biological parents for children's well-being. Scholarship in this vein often relies on stepparent families even though adoptive families provide an ideal opportunity to explore the role of biology in family life. In this study, we compare two-adoptive-parent families with other families on one key characteristic-parental investment. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudin…
Trading On Heterosexuality
In this study, the author uses ethnographic and interview data from a women's floor in a university residence hall to examine how some heterosexual women's gender strategies contribute to their homophobia. The author describes a prevailing heterosexual erotic market on campus-the Greek party scene-and the status hierarchy linked to it. Within this hierarchy, heterosexual women assign lesbians low rank because of their assumed disinterest in the e…
Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination
We examine how two sociological traditions account for the role of femininities in social domination. The masculinities tradition theorizes gender as an independent structure of domination; consequently, femininities that complement hegemonic masculinities are treated as passively compliant in the reproduction of gender. In contrast, Patricia Hill Collins views cultural ideals of hegemonic femininity as simultaneously raced, classed, and gendered…
Providing a ''Leg Up
Although higher education scholars are increasingly exploring disparities within institutions, they have yet to examine how parental involvement contributes to social-class variation in students' experiences. We ask, what role do parents play in producing divergent college experiences for students from different class backgrounds? Relying on interviews with 41 families, including mothers, fathers, and their daughters, we find that affluent parent…
More Is More or More Is Less? Parental Financial Investments during College
Evidence shows that parental financial investments increase college attendance, but we know little about how these investments shape postsecondary achievement. Two theoretical frameworks suggest diametric conclusions. Some studies operate from a more-is-more perspective in which children use calculated parental allocations to make academic progress. In contrast, a more-is-less perspective, rooted in a different model of rational behavior, suggest…
Racialized Equity Labor, University Appropriation and Student Resistance
We coin the term 'racialized equity labor' to describe the often uncompensated efforts of people of color to address systematic racism and racial marginalization within organizations. Using a year-long ethnographic and interview study of a majority-minority public university, we focus specifically on the racialized equity labor of college students who, like many faculty and staff of color, often labor to make their campuses comfortable and functi…
Marital Name Change as a Window into Gender Attitudes
The need to revise scholars' approach to the measurement of gender attitudes-long dominated by the separate-spheres paradigm-is growing increasingly timely as women's share of the labor force approaches parity with men's. Recent years have seen revived interest in marital name change as a gendered practice with the potential to aid in this task; however, scholars have yet to test its effectiveness as one possible indicator of gender attitudes. In…
Implications of Changing Family Forms for Children
This paper explores what it means to do a sociology of families, that is, one that acknowledges and considers a wider array of family forms than typically has been explored. We begin by reviewing the existing sociological research on a range of alternative family forms, ultimately focusing on older-parent, adoptive, same-sex, and multiracial families. We describe and critically assess four theoretical approaches to examining family forms-family s…
The Revised MRS
Using an ethnographic and longitudinal interview study of college women and in-depth interviews with their parents, I argue that mid-tier flagship universities still push women toward gender complementarity-a gender-traditional model of economic security pairing a career oriented man with a financially dependent woman. Combining multilevel and intersectional theories, I show that the infrastructure and campus peer culture at Midwest University su…
Parents, Partners, and Professions
with family resources and motivations, as well as the larger socio-economic context. In addition, not all projects-even if successfully executed-led to the same level of economic security
Racialized Horizontal Stratification in US Higher Education
In this review, we integrate three bodies of scholarship-education stratification research, political-historical sociology of higher education, and sociological theories of race and racism-to understand the production of 'separate and unequal' postsecondary experiences for racially marginalized college students in the United States. We argue that the US postsecondary system is plural, heterogeneous, and stratified partly as a result of hundreds o…
The For-Profit Side of Public U
Online enrollments in public universities have soared, in part because of universities' increasing reliance on for-profit online program managers (OPMs) for everything from instructional design to student recruitment. However, scholarship has indicated that OPMs may play a role in producing predatory forms of inclusion in higher education for marginalized students. To identify mechanisms through which this might occur, the authors conduct a mixed…
The Stigma of ADHD
Despite the increasing prevalence of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), little sociological research has focused on effects of diagnosis in schools. This study, which is grounded in the modified labeling approach, relies on three waves of Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K:2011) data to determine if teachers evaluate the academic performance of ADHD students as less promising than non-diagnosed peers. Results indicate that t…
White Flight in Public Higher Education? Racial Avoidance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions
Latine college students in the United States face increasing isolation in universities designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). We contend that this pattern is not just a function of Latine selection into particular universities. Using enrollment data for public four-year undergraduate institutions from 1990 to 2019, we show that White student enrollment declines after universities cross the 25 percent Latine threshold and become desig…
It's Complicated
The sexual and romantic activities of unmarried women at midlife are often invisible in survey research based on normative categories of adult intimacy. However, women at this stage in the life course are structurally positioned to innovate with intimacy. In our interviews with 53 Black and white women between ages 33-58, outside of stable partnerships, and open to sex and intimacy with men, we find that women's frustration with marriage and marr…
Sexual Assault on Campus
This article explains why rates of sexual assault remain high on college campuses. Data are from a study of college life at a large midwestern university involving nine months of ethnographic observation of a women's floor in a “party dorm,” in-depth interviews with 42 of the floor residents, and 16 group interviews with other students. We show that sexual assault is a predictable outcome of a synergistic intersection of processes operating at in…
Adoption
In the US and many industrialized nations, adoption is a legal act through which a child is placed under the permanent care and guardianship of one or more individuals who are not his or her biological parents. Through adoption, the parental rights and responsibilities of the child's birth parents are dissolved and transferred to the adoptive parents. Although adoptive parents have the same legal status as other parents in the US, assumptions abo…
Adoptive Parents, Adaptive Parents
Contemporary legal and scholarly debates emphasize the importance of biological parents for children's well-being. Scholarship in this vein often relies on stepparent families even though adoptive families provide an ideal opportunity to explore the role of biology in family life. In this study, we compare two-adoptive-parent families with other families on one key characteristic-parental investment. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudin…
Trading On Heterosexuality
In this study, the author uses ethnographic and interview data from a women's floor in a university residence hall to examine how some heterosexual women's gender strategies contribute to their homophobia. The author describes a prevailing heterosexual erotic market on campus-the Greek party scene-and the status hierarchy linked to it. Within this hierarchy, heterosexual women assign lesbians low rank because of their assumed disinterest in the e…
Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood
Current work on hooking up-or casual sexual activity on college campuses-takes an individualistic, 'battle of the sexes' approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women's sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs abou…
Is Hooking Up Bad for Young Women?
“Girls can't be guys in matters of the heart, even though they think they can,” says Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: HowYoung Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, published in 2007. In her view, “hooking up”—casual sexual activity ranging from kissing to intercourse—places women at risk of “low self-esteem, depression, alcoholism, and eating disorders.” Stepp is only one of half a dozen journalists currently engaged in the bu…
Marital Name Change as a Window into Gender Attitudes
The need to revise scholars' approach to the measurement of gender attitudes-long dominated by the separate-spheres paradigm-is growing increasingly timely as women's share of the labor force approaches parity with men's. Recent years have seen revived interest in marital name change as a gendered practice with the potential to aid in this task; however, scholars have yet to test its effectiveness as one possible indicator of gender attitudes. In…
Paying for the Party
In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.
More Is More or More Is Less? Parental Financial Investments during College
Evidence shows that parental financial investments increase college attendance, but we know little about how these investments shape postsecondary achievement. Two theoretical frameworks suggest diametric conclusions. Some studies operate from a more-is-more perspective in which children use calculated parental allocations to make academic progress. In contrast, a more-is-less perspective, rooted in a different model of rational behavior, suggest…
Good Girls
Women's participation in slut shaming is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures. In this article we synthesize insights from social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate women use slut stigma to draw boundaries around status groups linked to s…
The Revised MRS
Using an ethnographic and longitudinal interview study of college women and in-depth interviews with their parents, I argue that mid-tier flagship universities still push women toward gender complementarity-a gender-traditional model of economic security pairing a career oriented man with a financially dependent woman. Combining multilevel and intersectional theories, I show that the infrastructure and campus peer culture at Midwest University su…
Parenting to a Degree
Implications of Changing Family Forms for Children
This paper explores what it means to do a sociology of families, that is, one that acknowledges and considers a wider array of family forms than typically has been explored. We begin by reviewing the existing sociological research on a range of alternative family forms, ultimately focusing on older-parent, adoptive, same-sex, and multiracial families. We describe and critically assess four theoretical approaches to examining family forms-family s…
Going Greek
Social scientists have long recognized that college students from lower-income households have lower college completion rates than their more affluent peers who are attending the very same schools. Yet parsing the mechanisms through which relative socioeconomic disadvantage and privilege influence college completion has been difficult. This paper leverages a novel dataset comprising information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Sys…
Making the Case for Financial Aid 2.0
Providing a ''Leg Up
Although higher education scholars are increasingly exploring disparities within institutions, they have yet to examine how parental involvement contributes to social-class variation in students' experiences. We ask, what role do parents play in producing divergent college experiences for students from different class backgrounds? Relying on interviews with 41 families, including mothers, fathers, and their daughters, we find that affluent parent…
Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination
We examine how two sociological traditions account for the role of femininities in social domination. The masculinities tradition theorizes gender as an independent structure of domination; consequently, femininities that complement hegemonic masculinities are treated as passively compliant in the reproduction of gender. In contrast, Patricia Hill Collins views cultural ideals of hegemonic femininity as simultaneously raced, classed, and gendered…
Racialized Equity Labor, University Appropriation and Student Resistance
We coin the term 'racialized equity labor' to describe the often uncompensated efforts of people of color to address systematic racism and racial marginalization within organizations. Using a year-long ethnographic and interview study of a majority-minority public university, we focus specifically on the racialized equity labor of college students who, like many faculty and staff of color, often labor to make their campuses comfortable and functi…
Tolerable Suboptimization
We argue that the public defunding of public higher education and turn to private revenue streams—for example, non-resident tuition, grants, philanthropy, and corporate sponsorship—generates organizational racial resource disparities. We draw on a year-long qualitative case study of a University of California campus with a majority Latinx and low-income student body, including ethnographic observations and interviews with administrators, staff, a…
Classed Pathways to Marriage
Objective: This article identifies mechanisms through which social class background shapes the marital outcomes of college-going white American women. Background: Scholars are interested in the relative influences of ascriptive and achieved characteristics on mate selection. Research indicates that social class background continues to influence the marriage patterns of college-educated Americans but does not identify the mechanisms through which …
The Stigma of ADHD
Despite the increasing prevalence of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), little sociological research has focused on effects of diagnosis in schools. This study, which is grounded in the modified labeling approach, relies on three waves of Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K:2011) data to determine if teachers evaluate the academic performance of ADHD students as less promising than non-diagnosed peers. Results indicate that t…
Parents, Partners, and Professions
with family resources and motivations, as well as the larger socio-economic context. In addition, not all projects-even if successfully executed-led to the same level of economic security
“Diversity is a corporate plan”
Drawing on ninety-four interviews with university employees at two four-year publics, we identify elements of the “racialized equity labor”, or efforts to challenge racial inequities in the university environment, primarily undertaken by employees of color. We argue that the amount and intensity of racialized equity labor is related to organizational logics of race, or cultural values and beliefs about race that people use to organize their activ…
The For-Profit Side of Public U
Online enrollments in public universities have soared, in part because of universities' increasing reliance on for-profit online program managers (OPMs) for everything from instructional design to student recruitment. However, scholarship has indicated that OPMs may play a role in producing predatory forms of inclusion in higher education for marginalized students. To identify mechanisms through which this might occur, the authors conduct a mixed…
Racialized Horizontal Stratification in US Higher Education
In this review, we integrate three bodies of scholarship-education stratification research, political-historical sociology of higher education, and sociological theories of race and racism-to understand the production of 'separate and unequal' postsecondary experiences for racially marginalized college students in the United States. We argue that the US postsecondary system is plural, heterogeneous, and stratified partly as a result of hundreds o…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Higher Education Research Studies (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Economics (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Higher education (6 works) · Business (5 works)