Accumulating adversity and advantage on the path to postsecondary education: an application of a person-centered approach

I assess the usefulness of a new, person-centered method developed by Singer et al. (1998) to address the area of educational attainment. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, I focus on multiple life domains, and find common trends for aggregates of students. Using this method, I find that the bachelor's degree students' lives are characterized by both advantages and adversities across multiple life domains. However, for most of these students, the advantages far outweigh the adversities, either in sheer number, or in their distribution across life domains. Compared to bachelor's degree students, students with lesser educational outcomes have more adversities, spread across a greater number of realms. These findings bring into question the benefits of using this methodology over more traditional statistical techniques. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.