This Week @ UCSD
divider
divider
divider
divider
divider
divider
divider
divider
divider
Top Stories Print this story Print Forward to a Friend Forward

Fighting for a Seat
College-educated women going to extremes
to secure elite college
admission for their kids

Ioana Patringenaru | March 15, 2010

BestValue
Garey and Valerie Ramey co-authored "The Rug Rat Race," a look at what college-educated parents will do to get their children into top universities.

Are you a college-educated woman? Do you find that you spend an increasing amount of time driving your children to their activities? Are you hoping all these extra-curricular activities will get them into a good college?

Then congratulations: you’re officially caught up in what UC San Diego economist Valerie Ramey calls “The Rug Rat Race.” Ramey and her husband, Garey Ramey, also a UCSD economist, have described the phenomenon in a working paper of the same name for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The study is somewhat autobiographical, the Rameys admit. They used to live in San Diego’s Clairemont Mesa neighborhood and found raising their children there fairly easy, Valerie Ramey said. Then they moved across Highway 52 to University City. In their new neighborhood, children’s schedules were chock-full with sports, arts and other classes. “I was shocked to find moms with graduate degrees who had quit their jobs because they needed more time to drive their children to activities,” Ramey said. “I was just astounded that someone would spend so much time in school and give up a lucrative career to drive their children around.”

The rug rat race at home

Ramey admits she got caught up in the “rug rat race” herself at first. Her son played water polo. Her daughter was playing softball and was a member of the Brownie Girl Scouts. Later, her daughter developed a passion for horseback riding, which took up six hours a week. Ramey found herself hauling saddles and shoveling hay—and sometimes manure.  

But little by little, the family rebelled against all the activities—and against Ramey. Her husband sat her down and told her: “I know you’re competitive, but these other mothers are competing to see who is spoiling their children the most. You don’t want to win this one,” she recalls. “So, I came back to my senses,” she said.

Ramey’s son became involved with the family’s Catholic church, just a block away from their home. He became a youth group leader. Her daughter, who is now a sophomore in high school at The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, developed a passion for photography. She’s had pictures published in magazines and does most of her film work in La Jolla. This Christmas, the Rameys bought her equipment to set up her own studio at home. “So we hardly ever have to drive,” Ramey said.

A national phenomenon

BestValue
Both Rameys are professors in UCSD's department of economics.

At first, the Rameys thought they were just caught up in a fad that affected their neighborhood. But after reviewing data from 12 U.S. surveys describing how people spend their time, from 1965 to 2007, they realized they were onto something bigger. “It was a national phenomenon,” Valerie Ramey said.

The researchers found that the amount of time dedicated to childcare went up dramatically in the past 20 years, even while the number of children per household decreased.

The findings remained true even after applying a number of controls to the data. The Rameys also noticed that the increase happened right after the college educated started earning considerably more than other employees.

“The returns for going to college have never been better,” Valerie Ramey said.

The numbers

On average, the amount of time college-educated women spent on childcare went up from 13 to 22 hours per week since the mid-1990s. By contrast, the amount went up from 11 to 16 hours for women without a college education. Meanwhile, childcare went up from 4 to 10 hours for college-educated fathers, and from 4 to 8 hours for fathers without a college education.

The researchers said they were surprised that most of the increases came from time spent with older, school-age children. A category known as “chauffeuring” went up dramatically, in particular, the Rameys noticed. Basically, parents spent an awful lot of time driving their children from one activity to the next. “This is why these women went to get college degrees—to be well-educated chauffeurs,” Valerie Ramey joked.

To explain the discrepancy between the college educated and others, she referred to the book “Unequal Childhoods” by Annette Lareau. Less educated parents prefer a natural development style, which includes unsupervised play with friends and relatives in the neighborhood. The college educated prefer “concentrated cultivation,” which entails heavy parental involvement and supervised organized activities.

The researchers first spent a fair amount of time going through the data to tease out an explanation for what they had found. It wasn’t that their sample had changed over time. It wasn’t due to an increase in income, or an increase in crime rates, which would cause parents to spend more time supervising their children. It wasn’t that parents enjoyed spending more time on childcare. In fact, mothers said in surveys that childcare was less enjoyable than cooking and housework. It wasn’t that parents enjoyed more flexibility in their work schedules, either.

College admissions

Once again, the explanation came from the Rameys’ own life and that of the parents in their neighborhood. Valerie Ramey said she had always believed good grades were enough to get you into college. But as the years went by, she kept hearing about top students who weren’t admitted to the university of their choice. Activities, the Rameys started realizing, were just as important as grades for college admissions. Hence, the increasing amount of time spent on childcare, especially on activities for older children.

The increase happened just as college admissions became more and more competitive. The number of high school graduates eligible to go to college has gone up dramatically in the past two decades, but college slots haven’t, Valerie Ramey pointed out. The increase also happened around the same time when college graduates started making a lot more money than everyone else. So, parents were filling their children’s schedules with activities in the hope that it would get them into a good college and help them secure a lucrative job later on, the Rameys concluded.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers compared childcare data for the United States and Canada, where college admissions are a lot less competitive. But the country is still subject to many of the same social fads as the United States. The Rameys found that the amount of time parents spent on childcare in that country remained flat during the past two decades.  

“Suddenly everything came together,” Valerie Ramey said. “None of the pieces of evidence we have is bulletproof, but we have a lot of pieces that all point in the same direction.”

It’s unclear how long parents will have to compete in the rug rat race. Demographics dictate that the number of high school graduates eligible for college will drop once children of the baby boomers graduate. Also, a number of groups and popular authors have begun a rebelling against overly structured parenting, Ramey said, citing the “free range children” movement and the book “The Idle Parent” by Tom Hodgkinson.

“I think we’re already seeing a backlash,” she said.

By the way, being a youth group leader worked out rather nicely for the Rameys’ son. He’s studying engineering at Stanford.

Want to keep up with what is happening at UC San Diego?
Subscribe to This Week @ UCSD.

spacer
Subscribe Contact Us Got News UCSD News
spacer

UCSD University Communications

9500 Gilman Drive MC0938
La Jolla, CA 92093-0938
858-534-3120

Email: thisweek@ucsd.edu