Robert Denis Mare (1951 – February 1, 2021) was an American sociologist and demographer best known for research on social stratification. He received numerous awards and had his research covered in the popular press. Mare served as the President of the Population Association of America (PAA) in 2010 and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. At the time of his death, he had retired from his position as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Early life and education
Robert Mare was born in North Vancouver, Canada, in 1951, to Arthur and Helen Mare. He completed his undergraduate degree at Reed College in 1973 and obtained a Ph.D. in sociology at the University Michigan, where he was also a trainee at the Population Studies Center in 1977.
Mare collaborated with Christopher Winship from the 1980s through the early 1990s, where they produced articles revolving around the topics of statistical modeling, education attainment and unemployment.
Youth unemployment and school-to-work transition Mare worked with Winship on issues related to youth unemployment and the transition from school to workplace. Their work revealed the importance of selection bias and population compositional changes in understanding employment trends. Mare argued that changes in employment rates among youth were not just due to individual action but also due to compositional changes in the labor force. They also applied this framework to explain the rise of black youth in the 1970s and 1980s, attributing it to increased school enrollment and military enlistment among black youth. Their works focused on how changes in school enrollment or military enlistment affected employment rates across different demographic groups, pinpointing to the interplay between individual actions and macro-level societal trends.
Selection bias and statistical methods Mare's early academic studies were influenced by quantitative social science research methodology. Mare's interest in selection bias was evident in his early work on educational attainment, where he found that how differential attrition like dropping out of school could alter the relationship between social background and educational outcomes. He underscored the importance of addressing selection bias in social research. In his 1992 paper on Annual Review of Sociology, he proposed a combination of approaches-ranging from Heckman's estimator to semi-parametric methods and Manski's bounds to ensure the robustness in social research.
Career Mare started his career as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, where he was well known for mentorship, from 1977 to 1997, moving up through the ranks from assistant to full professor. Mare was a fellow of Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1983 to 1984, and a visiting senior social scientist at the RAND Corporation from 1994 to 1995. He directed the University of Wisconsin's Center for Demography and Ecology from 1989 to 1994. In 1997, Mare moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also held an appointment in statistics. He was a founding member of the California Center for Population Research in 1998 and became a distinguished professor in 2007.
Mare's research examined social trends in education, work, marriage, and residential and social mobility. He studied the reproduction of social inequality across generations and the self-perpetuation of social hierarchies. Mare found, for example, an increase between 1960 and 2010 in the proportion of American couples in which both members have a college degree, demonstrating that such a pattern can also increase inequality in the resources available to children, with implications for children's own achievement. His research on marriage received coverage in such media outlets as The Atlantic and The New York Times. Mare is perhaps best known for the "Mare Model," according to which a person's educational trajectory is understood as the product of a sequence of decisions made at successive stages.
Mare expanded on a cumulative model that operationalized educational attainment and implemented unemployment as a critical contingency, brought family formation and demographic processes into the study of mobility, and advanced sociology research beyond the scope of kinship influence of parents to multiple generations. Mare's major works concentrated on sociology research in the scopes of educational stratification, assortative mating, residential mobility, and demographic modeling.
Mare Model of educational attainment
Historical context The foundation of the Mare Model arose from Mare's 1977 Dissertation that studied educational attainment through grade progression of white males from 1907 to 1957. A large aspect of his study depended on the historical context of how education had changed from 1907 to 1957 among his later cohorts, especially (minority) students and military veterans.
By 1918, all the U.S. states had enacted legislation that required all children to obtain mandatory education until a certain age, which began the era of universal education within the United States. However, these regulations were not sufficiently enforced by the states until at least 1930. Another pivotal turning point in education growth in the United States occurred after World War II, when Congress passed the GI Bill of 1944 (Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944) that aided in the establishment of numerous programs in support of war veterans to re-accustom them to their lives back home. This legislation was significant in enabling the thousands of veterans to pursue undergraduate or graduate education in many universities throughout the country. With the end of World War II, the United States became involved in a battle of ideology with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a conflict to spread their ideology through propaganda, military prowess, and financial support to new, decolonized nations. A roadblock to U.S. plans was the fear of new colonies moving into the Soviet Orbit due to these colonies viewing the United States as a nation of oppression of African Americans and other minority groups. This led to the Civil Rights Movement and the Brown v Board of Education court case in 1954, because it expanded access to education and other opportunities for African Americans and minorities. Another vital impact of the Cold War was an increased emphasis on education to cultivate new talent in the United States. In particular, after the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik program, U.S. fears about Soviet influence drastically increased, which resulted in much greater effort on Research and Development. This caused the Research and Development budgets of the United States to grow from 17.4 billion dollars to 44.1 billion dollars after the launch of Sputnik. Some of these funds were used for education research in order to understand education attainment and how it is affected by socioeconomic factors to fight against poverty and continue innovating. These major events influenced a large aspect of the education research area from the mid-20th century and the foundation of the Mare Model.
Previous research in educational attainment Prior to the Mare Model, Blau-Duncan's Basic Model of Social Attainment used quantitative methods to study education and how it is influenced through the role of family, especially a father's social status. In particular, this early model showed a positive relationship between the father's education and job status with the child's own education and first job. Therefore, this model was vital in determining the impact of family on education and career prospects. This research was a major foundation of the Mare model. When Mare started his research, many sociologists were investigating unemployment in the population, especially among 16-18 year olds and among the African American population, due to significant government grants. However, there was a shift in focus to the transition between education and work and military and civil life. This led to many researchers emphasizing how the overall schooling of an individual impacts their professions and other characteristics. For example, these researchers emphasized how obtaining a Ph.D. would impact their ability to obtain a job compared with someone with a master's or bachelor's degree. This led to many researchers starting to use statistical and computer models to represent the impact and cause of educational attainment with various factors, from social standing to parental support, and employment prospects.
Principles of the Mare Model The foundation of the Mare model emphasized the role of progression from one education level to another, and how progression is impacted by a number of social factors. In particular, the Mare Model emphasized how transitions from one to another, such as from 8th grade to 9th grade or 12th grade to college, not only impact each successive grade but are impacted by many other social factors, like socioeconomic status, family support, and a military background. This model uncovered information about education by discovering social factors about schooling and their impact on progression through the educational system.
Impact and results of the Mare Model In the Mare's 1977 dissertation, a contribution afforded by Mare to the social stratification community was the use of new and advanced statistical methods to study education attainment that has become a classic model for occupational and education studies in many regions of the world. A model pioneered by Mare has enabled more precise comparison between three main categories: cross-cohort comparison at the same transition points, cross-national comparison at the same transition point, and cohort comparison across different transition points. Therefore, Mare's model allowed for comparison of how education attainment could vary across the nation and among different categories based on social factors and their specific transition point of education. This allowed for the researchers to answer a wide range of questions regarding how the impact of various transition points from nursery school to graduate school could impact or be impacted by a range of factors, from a father's occupation to the level of funding for a school. In addition, it allowed for the study of how cities and nations vary in terms of educational attainment and possible reasons that some education systems are better equipped for student progression.