‘Economic Connectedness’ and Classroom Interactions
Could more AP courses help with cross-income interactions?
Written by Lory Hough
“Back in 2022, Harvard professor Raj Chetty released a new report about the deep connection between friendship and economic mobility. Drawing on a massive dataset of more than 72 million social media users, Chetty found that people tend to befriend others with similar incomes. Chetty also found that when low-income children grow up in communities with what he calls “economic connectedness,” meaning they have connections with people from other socio-economic groups, they are much more likely to rise out of poverty.
When Ph.D. student Farah Mallah learned about Chetty’s work, she knew it would help her own research on income and education.
“I read his work, and it made me think about the role of schools in helping or hindering cross-class interactions,” she says. “I wanted to understand what school policies impact cross-income interactions from forming.” As she writes in a related paper that she’s working on, “The strong relationship between cross-income friendships and longterm outcomes leads to the question: Can we do anything about it? How schools are organized could make it easier or harder for friendships to form between lower- and upper-income students.”
Mallah started looking into one area where students interact (or don’t) in schools: the classroom. In particular, she looked at what impact adding an AP class would have on cross-income interactions.
Using data from Texas state administrators that spanned from 2004 to 2022, and with a dissertation grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, Mallah was able to look at the exact classes that students in grades 5 to 12 were taking. She found that the likelihood that lower-income students were exposed to upper-income students was low. On average, she writes, “the typical (median) lower-income student goes through grades 5 to 12 having one-tenth the share of upper- income classmates as their upper-income counterparts, and one in every five lower-income students has a share of upper-income classmates smaller than 1%.”
This lack of exposure that lower- and higher-income students have to one another — the economic connectedness that Chetty noted — makes it difficult for students to form cross-income friendships.
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