Divergent Approaches to Access: How Selective College Admissions Offices Recruit Lower-Income, First-Generation, and Working-Class Students

In recent years, selective colleges and universities have made diversifying their student bodies a top priority, yet the class diversity on these campuses has barely shifted. While most research on class disparities in college admissions focuses on student explanations, this study seeks to understand how campus admissions approaches to recruitment may also contribute to why so few lower-income, first-generation, and/or working-class students (LIFGWC students) attend selective colleges. To address this question, we conducted interviews with seven admissions officers from selective campuses with both relatively strong and weak records of LIFGWC students recruitment. Institutions with stronger records of recruiting LIFGWC students actively sought out new initiatives to make their college more accessible for LIFGWC students, and these actions were motivated by a shared focus on improving larger societal inequality. Although campuses with weaker records also expanded their recruitment strategies, their efforts were often piecemeal and motivated by competition for students and institutional rankings rather than a larger mission to improve diversity and equity. These findings suggest that institutional missions and philosophies are central to increasing access.

God, Grades, and Graduation

It’s widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories? Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers’ religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. God, Grades, and Graduation introduces readers to a childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups and accounts for Americans’ deep relationship with God: religious restraint. This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower-middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper-class kids—and for girls especially—religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality.

Introduction

This chapter begins by showing why college is so consequential to Americans’ lives. It then describes how and why the US education system is stratified by social class. The road to college, especially a selective college, is much smoother for those who come from more affluent and educated families. The farther down on the socioeconomic ladder you go, the bumpier and steeper the climb to college becomes. Social class matters to children’s schooling because parents’ childrearing strategies continue to influence children even after they leave home. Yet the current narratives that we have about adolescents do not reflect their religious upbringing. The chapter introduces a new childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups and accounts for the role of religion: “religious restraint.” This chapter also describes the state of religion in America and explains why this book is primarily about “abiders”—Christians who display high degrees of religiosity.

Unexpected Destinations

This chapter argues that an upbringing of religious restraint constrains college choices, especially for professional-class kids. It does so by recalibrating their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to rarely consider a selective college despite their excellent grades in high school. As a result, religiously restrained teens—and especially those from the professional class who have the resources to make it to college—tend to undermatch in the college selection process. This is evident among men and is especially prevalent among women. Girls who grow up with religious restraint have a self-concept centered around family, service, and God. They do not aspire toward prestigious careers, which makes a degree from a selective college less valuable. Unlike less affluent teens who want to improve their class position by gaining a college degree, religiously restrained teens are content maintaining their class position by attending college close to home and reproducing traditional gender norms.

Effects of Peers and Rank on Cognition, Preferences, and Personality

We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that enrolling in a selective college improves university exam scores of the marginally admitted females, and makes them less overconfident and less risk averse, while males in selective colleges experience a decline in extraversion and conscientiousness. We find differences in peer quality and rank concerns to be driving our findings.

Increasing Access to Selective High Schools through Place-Based Affirmative Action: Unintended Consequences

We investigate whether elite Chicago public high schools differentially benefit high-achieving students from more and less affluent neighborhoods. Chicago’s place-based affirmative action policy allocates seats based on achievement and neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES). Using regression discontinuity design (RDD), we find that these schools do not raise test scores overall, but students are generally more positive about their high school experiences. For students from low-SES neighborhoods, we estimate negative effects on grades and the probability of attending a selective college. We present suggestive evidence that these findings for students from low-SES neighborhoods are driven by the negative effect of relative achievement ranking. (JEL H75, I21, I24, I28, R23)

Do Teach For America Corps Members Still Improve Student Achievement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of Teach For America's Scale-Up Effort

In 2010, Teach For America (TFA) launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation scale-up grant from the U.S. Department of Education. To examine the effectiveness of TFA elementary school teachers in the second year of the scale-up, we recruited thirty-six schools from ten states and randomly assigned students in participating schools to a class taught by a TFA teacher or a class taught by a comparison teacher. We then gathered data on student achievement and surveyed teachers on their educational background, preparation for teaching, and teaching experience. The TFA teachers in the study schools had substantially less teaching experience than comparison teachers but were more likely to have graduated from a selective college. Overall, TFA and comparison teachers in the study were similarly effective in teaching both reading and math. TFA teachers in early elementary classrooms (grades 2 and below), however, were more effective than comparison teachers: TFA teachers in prekindergarten through grade 2 had a positive, statistically significant effect of 0.12 standard deviations on students’ reading achievement, and TFA teachers in grades 1 and 2 had a positive, marginally significant effect of 0.16 standard deviations on student math achievement.

Geographies of Campus Inequality

In efforts to improve equity, selective college campuses are increasingly focused on recruiting and retaining first-generation students—those whose parents have not graduated from college. In Geographies of Campus Inequality, sociologists Benson and Lee argue that these approaches may fall short if they fail to consider the complex ways first-generation status intersects with race, ethnicity, and gender. Drawing on interview and survey data from selective campuses, the authors show that first generation students do not share a universal experience. Rather, first generation students occupy one of four disparate geographies on campus within which they negotiate academic responsibilities, build relationships, engage in campus life, and develop post-college aspirations. Importantly, the authors demonstrate how geographies are shaped by organizational practices and campus constructions of class, race, and gender. Geographies of Campus Inequality expands the understanding of first-generation students’ campus lives and opportunities for mobility by showing there is more than one way to be first generation.