Criminal Records and Higher Education Access: A College Admissions Experiment

• In Event: Probing Structural Inequality: Expansion of Audit Examinations to Educational Contexts

Abstract

Higher education occupies a central role in the American consciousness as a driver of social mobility, a facilitator of full social membership, and a potentially compelling mechanism for facilitating reintegration for criminal justice involved people. Yet, because most college students today were required to self-report criminal history information when they applied, and surveys suggest at least some have been denied because of their records, the benefits of college may be out of reach for students with prior justice system involvement. Further, the increasing scrutiny of criminal records in college admissions is especially consequential for groups most subject to the criminal justice system, particularly young Black males who are underrepresented on college campuses and overrepresented in the justice system. Thus, criminal history disclosure requirements could raise additional barriers to racial progress, student learning, and democracy.

The American college campus has been a site of social closure and exclusion since the earliest North American higher education institutions. Access to college has been limited or restricted, directly and indirectly, on the bases of race and ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, or religion at various times throughout American history. Thus, if a criminal record poses a similar challenge to higher education access as it has historically for women, people of color, or religious minorities, then prior criminal justice involvement could prevent formerly justice involved people from full social membership, educational attainment, and the associated beneficial effects with respect to desistance from crime and the transition to adulthood.

In this study, I use a “modified” experimental audit approach to test whether justice-involved applicants face discrimination because of their criminal records, and whether the magnitude of discrimination varies by race. Because the higher education context differs from other audit contexts by requiring official documentation that could not be fabricated, I recruited real participant testers with and without felony records and matched them on key qualifications. I sent matched, same-race pairs of applications to a national sample of non-elite U.S. four-year colleges. Within each pair, one application disclosed a felony record. Race was randomly assigned to tester pairs for each college, so the same pairs applied at some colleges as both Black and other colleges as both White. I find that a felony record, while not a categorical disqualifier, can become a major impediment to college access. Further, evidence from mixed effects logistic regression models suggests that tester applicants were penalized more for their criminal records when they applied as Black than when they applied as White to colleges that required disclosure. I discuss the implications of these findings relative to social exclusion, educational attainment, and desistance.

Author

• Robert Stewart, University of Maryland