Reproducing Inequality? College Recruitment Networks in the Post-Affirmative Action Era

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4. Contemporary Dilemmas in Higher Education

Abstract

Colleges and universities actively recruit students from high schools across the United States, yet the national structure of recruitment remains largely unobserved. Existing research shows that recruiting visits help institutions cultivate relationships and shape applicant pools, but evidence is limited to case studies and regional analyses. As a result, we lack systematic knowledge of how recruitment operates as an organizational mechanism structuring access to higher education. Because recruitment influences which students are exposed to institutions and encouraged to apply, it represents a critical but understudied site of social stratification.

This paper constructs the first national, longitudinal approximation of the college-to–high school recruiting network from 2019 to 2023. Using privacy-protected mobility data, we identify devices plausibly associated with college admissions officers and measure in-person visits to high schools. These visits form a bipartite network linking more than 2,500 colleges to high schools nationwide, comprising over one million observed visits. We link these network ties to administrative data from IPEDS, the Common Core of Data, and the Private School Universe Survey to examine institutional and school-level characteristics.

We situate this network within the policy shift produced by Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College (2023), which curtailed race-conscious admissions practices. As admissions become formally race-neutral, recruitment may become a central site of institutional adaptation, shaping applicant pools in ways that either mitigate or reproduce racialized and socioeconomic inequalities.

Descriptive network analyses assess institutional out-degree, geographic reach, and the distribution of visits across public and private high schools. Multivariate negative binomial models examine whether high school racial composition, Title I status, and socioeconomic disadvantage predict the number of college visits over time, including whether these relationships shift in 2023.

By conceptualizing recruitment as a national organizational network, this study advances sociological understanding of how higher education institutions respond to legal changes within a stratified system.

Authors

• Kevin McElrath, Davidson College

• Chris Marsicano, Davidson College

• Martin S Anderson, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro