Getting Directions or Going it Alone: Race, Class and Connections in the College Application Process

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Today, more and more students are aspiring to go to college, and more are enrolling in four-year colleges, particularly under-represented students. However, lower-income and racial/ethnic minority students tend to enroll in less selective schools. But, research suggests that minorities and students from low-income backgrounds tend to benefit the most from attending more selective schools. Thus, the postsecondary transition has taken on a new role in the reproduction of inequality – today, it is not just whether or not a student attends college, but which college she attends that affects her life chances.

Considering this, we need to understand more about how students are making decisions about colleges, and the influence of institutions on these decisions. My research focuses on these critical questions: How do high educational aspirations influence the ways in which different types of students navigate the college application process? How are students thinking about and making choices between schools of varying levels of selectivity? What role do high schools play in contributing to or ameliorating horizontal stratification in higher education? To answer these questions, I examined how different types of students navigate the process, and the ways in which high schools structure students’ access to different sources of social capital, which I argue points them toward different postsecondary destinations.

From 2010-2012, I conducted a two-year, multi-method study of two racially and socioeconomically diverse public high schools, incorporating observations, interviews with students, teachers, counselors, administrators, independent college counselors and college admissions officers, as well as surveys with students. I found that students at these schools had very high educational aspirations – 87 out of the 89 juniors and seniors I interviewed aspired to go to college and expected to attend once they graduated. Students felt intense pressure to not just attend any college, but particularly four-year schools. However, the ways in which they went about reaching those aspirations varied based on students’ social background. I found that racial and class inequalities were reproduced through unequal access to key sources of information, even among students in the same school. The social capital that students accessed through their peers, counselors and college admissions officers influenced their application to more and less selective colleges. The schools’ structure and organization facilitated connections to these different sources of social capital, though this brokering of social ties did not work the same for all students.

There is little qualitative research on how students navigate the college application process and of this, the majority has examined students in homogenous environments, showing how high schools’ organization, resources and cultures reflect and perpetuate students’ social class origins. My research sites were uniquely situated in that they reflected upper middle class culture and were well-resourced, yet enrolled students from a diverse range of social backgrounds, allowing me to ascertain the differences in how students experience the college application process, even within the same context. My research shows that rather than benefiting the less advantaged students who attend, these schools sometimes seemed to work against them. I found that the organization of the schools encouraged more advantaged students to cluster together, creating closed networks. As a result, these diverse environments provided little benefit in terms of information and resources to less advantaged students. Social connections became another way for more advantaged groups to claim status and position themselves for advantages, excluding others.

I also examined the influence of a new type of connection that occurs during the college application process – the interactions between students, college admissions officers and higher education institutions via marketing and recruiting – on students’ college decision-making. Despite concerns about how students are making choices between more and less selective schools and the impact of undermatching on student success, the effect of higher education marketing on this phenomenon remains largely unexamined. I found that when students lacked socially connected peers or parents, they were forced to rely on the school to broker ties. The schools put students in touch with guidance counselors, but also with numerous colleges themselves. While brokering helped some students, it hurt others who had difficulty connecting with counselors, and were left vulnerable to higher education marketing through school-sponsored application events.

The support that I have received from the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship has allowed me conduct additional analyses on the data I collected in 2010-2012, as well as begin to collect additional data. The new analyses have allowed me to dig deeper into my data and draw out a richer understanding of the mechanisms within the high schools I studied that contributed to horizontal stratification in students’ college destinations. I am currently working on a book manuscript that tells the stories of the students at these schools and am collecting follow up data on a sub-sample of students to examine the effect of students’ college application experiences on their postsecondary pathways.

Author

• Megan M. Holland, University at Buffalo SUNY