Student Claims and Organizational Tracks: Explaining the Production and Disruption of Inequality in U.S. Higher Education

• In Event: 20880 - Historical Foundations and New Directions: 21st Century Sociology of Education

Abstract

A growing literature identifies U.S. colleges and universities as causal contributors to inequality in students’ college experiences and outcomes, particularly regarding bachelor’s degree completion. A much smaller literature describes the organizational mechanisms driving that causal impact. Drawing on theories of relational inequality and racialized organizations, together with the educational literature on tracking, we develop a new conceptual framework explaining how colleges and universities generate (and mitigate) inequality. We draw on three rounds of student interview data gathered over a single academic year, combined with eight years of administrative records, to build this framework, examining the relationship between the resources students bring with them to college, the demands or “claims” that students make on their colleges, organizational responses to these claims over time, and the student experiences and outcomes that result. We find that while students’ discrepant pre-college resources predispose them towards differential claims-making behavior, colleges often amplify these differences by tracking students into distinct organizational niches with unequal capacities to respond to students’ claims, and in turn, to support students’ forward progress to degree. Yet we further find that this process does not always increase existing inequalities: in some instances, colleges’ tracking responses can disrupt patterns of cumulative advantage stemming from students’ pre-college resources to produce better and more equitable outcomes than pre-college resources may suggest. By describing the mechanisms driving these patterns, we develop a generalizable conceptual approach for scholars seeking to explain colleges’ organizational impacts on student inequality; we also discuss how this approach can directly support higher education leaders working to produce better and more equitable degree completion outcomes for all students.

Authors

• Christina Ciocca Eller, Harvard University

• Krista Galleberg, Harvard University

• Hana Kim