Pathways to Prosperity or Persistent Inequality? Academic Tracking in American Universities

• In Event: 34.018 - Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Academic tracking has long constituted separate and unequal pathways, dividing students by race and class and challenging popular conceptions of meritocracy and democratic education (Kelly & Carbonaro, 2012; Oakes, 1985; Oakes, Gamoran, & Page, 1992; Oakes & Saunders, 2008; Rosenbaum, 1976); however, as Shields (2014) asserts, what is perhaps less well known is that “the playing field in higher education mirrors that of K-12 education” (p. 114). This largely understudied trend suggests that the sorting function of education (tracking) has moved into the space of postsecondary education.
At present, postsecondary sorting is best evidenced by an increasingly stratified system of higher education. Despite a more recent increase in the number of middle-class students attending two-year institutions, students from low-income and working-class backgrounds remain largely concentrated at the bottom tiers of the academic hierarchy, while those with the most advantage remain concentrated at the top (Carnevale, 2014; Hearn & Rosinger, 2014; Shavit, Arum, & Gamoran, 2007). At this systemic level, the consequences of social stratification are palpable. However, very little attention is paid to even deeper levels of stratification within colleges and universities where academic tracking and its consequences are manifest. As access across the system of higher education has increased, so too has competition (Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 2009), prompting strategic moves within many of the nation’s most accessible colleges and universities to attract talented, high-performing students (e.g., via honors education) and simultaneously meet the needs of a larger number of academically underprepared students (e.g., via developmental/remedial education). Although these new organizational structures, such as honors and developmental education, are legitimated as educational “pathways” within many of the more “accessible” postsecondary institutions, they arguably function as a continuation of earlier tracking structures, channeling students from particular social backgrounds into separate and unequal tracks, leading to unequal outcomes.

Author

• Amy Elizabeth Stich, Northern Illinois University