Race, Income, and the Stratification of College Enrollment Patterns, 1980-2010

• In Event: Underrepresented and Underserved Students: A Focus on Institutional Assessment and Responsibility

Abstract

As college attendance has become the norm and the returns to college selectivity have become increasingly different, evidence suggests that advantaged groups have begun to use qualitative differences in post-secondary attainment to maintain their socioeconomic position. This paper uses micro data from the past 30 years to examine trends in student sorting by race into schools of differing levels of selectivity. We quantify differences in college enrollment using the v-gap methodology which allows us to investigate at which points in the selectivity distribution disparities are the greatest. We find that black-white and Hispanic-white gaps in college enrollment have gotten smaller since 1990 but that these same gaps, conditional on attending at least moderately selective colleges, have grown.

Authors

• Sean F. Reardon, Stanford University

• Rachel Baker, Stanford University

• Daniel Klasik, University of Maryland - College Park