Abstract
Past research on socioeconomic status (SES) and test performance in higher education has highlighted the factors that depress performance among students from low-SES backgrounds. We complement this work by focusing on how cues of affluence and prestige in the physical environments of elite universities may boost performance among students from high-SES backgrounds, thereby exacerbating the existing performance gap between high and low-SES students. We randomly assigned 122 high-SES and 100 low-SES students to take a standardized test in an environment with affluence cues or one without affluence cues. We found a significant interaction between student-SES and testing environment, such that students from high-SES backgrounds outperformed students from low-SES backgrounds to a greater extent when affluence cues were present than when they were absent. These findings suggest that the physical environments of elite universities can contribute to the achievement gap between high and low-SES students. Theoretical and educational policy implications are discussed.
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Notes
In addition to the affluence cues manipulation, we included a university identity prime manipulation by giving half of the participants t-shirts and pencils with the school’s logo, and the other half a plain t-shirt and pencil. Our goal was to assess if the effects of affluence cues would be moderated by whether students were reminded of their identity as members of the university. This identity salience manipulation did not have any effect on students’ test performance, F(1,214) = .02, p = .89, and also did not significantly interact with either students’ SES or the presence of affluence cues in the environment (all p’s greater than .4). Therefore, in this paper we report findings collapsed across the identity prime conditions.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a Research Initiative on Diversity & Equity (RIDE) Award from the University of California, Los Angeles, to H.W. Ni, B.M. Goodale, P.A. Goff & Y.J. Huo, as well as National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships awarded to H.W. Ni and B.M. Goodale.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Examples of objects in the affluent and control testing environments
1.2 Social class levels question
Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to the combination of education, income, and job an individual possesses. A teacher with a Masters Degree in Education who earns $40,000 a year may consider herself a median SES; although she does not earn much, her professional degree places her in a higher SES bracket. Please indicate where you believe your family to fall compared to other Americans:
Very high SES: Top-level executives, multi-millionaires, celebrities, and national politicians; individuals often have an Ivy League education and professional degrees. Annual household incomes of $150,000–$500,000 and above.
High SES: Highly-educated individuals, often with graduate or professional degrees, corporate elite and/or middle management with large work autonomy and economic security. Annual household incomes of $75,000–$150,000.
Median SES: College-educated workers, white-collared semi-professionals and/or craftsmen with some work autonomy. Annual household incomes of $35,000–$75,000.
Low SES: Blue collar workers or individuals with low job security; may have completed high school education. Annual household incomes of $16,000–$35,000.
Very low SES: Individuals typically living below poverty line with little to no participation in the work force and may have some high school education.
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Ni, H.W., Goodale, B.M. & Huo, Y.J. How the rich get richer: affluence cues at universities increase the social class achievement gap. Soc Psychol Educ 23, 125–141 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-019-09528-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-019-09528-z