Abstract
This chapter uses 10 years of enrollment data at three Texas public universities to examine whether, to what extent, and in what ways racial and ethnic differences in college achievement can be traced to high school attended. To identify school attributes responsible for unequal college readiness, we estimate fixed effects models for three high school strata defined by the socioeconomic composition of the student body. We find that high school affluence does not insulate minority students from achievement disparities vis-à-vis their same school classmates beyond the first semester. Furthermore, high school influences on academic achievement carry over through the college career, but only at institutions with selective admissions.
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Notes
- 1.
The Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (THEOP) collected these data (see http://www.texastop10.princeton.edu.) Files are available at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.
- 2.
Applicant percentile rank is calculated using the actual class rank and senior class size. For UT—Austin, 2.8 % of applicants’ records lack precise class rank measures, but instead include an indicator of class rank within ranges. We smoothed these applicants into appropriate class rank ranges and would like to thank Mark Long (University of Washington) for generously sharing his Stata code to facilitate the interpolation.
- 3.
We use publicly available data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to identify special and alternative high schools, which are excluded from the analysis.
- 4.
The measure of students ever economically disadvantaged was provided in response to a specific request to the Texas Education Agency.
- 5.
This approach is consistent with Rutter’s (1983) recommendation to focus on relative differences among schools based on their placement in a distribution rather mean differences that can obscure inequities within and between schools.
- 6.
According to the Texas Public School Statistics, Pocket Editions 2004–2005 and 2005–2006, Hispanics comprised 35 % of public high school graduates, African Americans 13 %, and Asian and other groups about 4 %. Just under half of Texas public high school graduates were white (48 %) in 2004, down from 56 % a decade earlier.
- 7.
Domina (2007) provides a detailed account of the Longhorn and Century Scholarship program. Classification of high schools is relatively stable over time, but owing to the rapid growth of the high school population during the observation period, some schools shifted between categories. The Longhorn/Century high schools do not change their designation, however, even if the dates of entry into the program differ.
- 8.
Because many students take time off, or are required to extend their studies for additional semesters when they change majors or to fulfill specific requirements, most institutions reports use the 6-year graduation rate.
- 9.
A complementary approach to the method of using high school fixed effects would be to measure and examine the predictors of school-specific race gaps (Stiefel et al. 2006).
- 10.
Even before the top 10 % law was passed, over 90 percent of students who graduated in the top decile of their class were admitted to UT and TAMU. The law converted a de facto standard to a de jure criterion, but also changed the high school sending patterns. Although standardized test scores were not considered in the admission decision of top 10 % graduates after 1997, all students were required to submit the scores for an application to be considered complete. Schools could establish criteria for ranking students, but not the cut-points. To avoid gaming, schools were required to submit the number of students and the exact ranking, which we used in deriving the class rank distribution.
- 11.
One caveat is that the coefficients are only identified using high schools that send multiple students to a particular institution and where the race and ethnic background of the students differs. Fletcher and Tienda conducted a sensitivity analysis restricting the sample to high schools that send students from multiple race groups and concluded that the results were robust. However, we will conduct the robustness test for the strata-specific estimates in the future.
- 12.
The large point estimate for Asians warrants caution because it is based on a relatively small number of students—less than 1 % of all graduates from poor high schools attending TAMU are Asian.
- 13.
We have no way of knowing whether any of the students or their parents are foreign-born, which in the case of African Americans often involves students with highly educated parents rather than underrepresented minorities. Most Caribbean populations settle in the northeast or southeast, so this potential bias is likely to be small.
- 14.
Fletcher and Tienda (2010) examined choice of major as a potential avenue through grade point gaps widen after the freshman year. They detected little evidence that Black and Hispanic students sort into majors in ways that accentuate achievement gaps at the public flagships, but there is suggestive evidence that major choices accentuate race and ethnic grade gaps at UTSA.
- 15.
Data censoring precludes analysis of 6-year graduation rates for all but a few cohorts; therefore we analyze 4-year graduation rates mainly to illustrate the large variation by institutional selectivity. We exclude UTSA from the graduation analyses.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the Ford, Mellon, and Hewlett Foundations and NSF (GRANT # SES-0350990). We gratefully acknowledge institutional support from Princeton University’s Office of Population Research (NICHD Grant # R24 H0047879). An earlier version was presented at the 2009 annual meetings of the Association for Public Policy and Management, Washington DC and at the Race in America Conference, Center on Race and Social Problems, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, June 5, 2010.
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Fletcher, J.M., Tienda, M. (2015). High School Quality and Race Differences in College Achievement. In: Bangs, R., Davis, L. (eds) Race and Social Problems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0863-9_9
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