| Josh Klugman
Indiana University
Status competition among schools and the consequences for students
FINAL REPORT
In the popular press and media, there are signs of increasing anxiety over the role of high schools in students' college destination. Families, particularly upper-middle-class ones, strive to send their children to the right high schools so they can enroll in the right colleges. In addition, policy-makers have discussed targeting more resources at high schools -- in particular, Advanced Placement and other college-preparatory curricula -- to help low-SES students' chances of attending four-year colleges, and selective four-year colleges. This study tests the assumption that school resources can help students gain admission to nonselective and selective colleges by using data from the National Longitudinal Study (NELS) and the High School Effectiveness Study (HSES). The author also tests theories suggest by the sociology of education literature that (a) school resources might explain why students from families with high socioeconomic status(SES) are more likely to attend selective colleges and (b) high-SES and high-ability students are more likely to benefit from school resources in terms of attending selective college.
The effects of school resources on both college applications and college destination are modeled. The author analyzes the effect of a broad array of material and social school resources --AP courses, school activities, school informational resources (assistance with the college application process), general school resources (spending, pupil-teacher ratio, teacher salaries, and teacher education), school SES, school nonpoverty, and school test scores. Results show that both material and social school resources do increase students' chances of applying to and enrolling in selective colleges, but these effects are primarily confined to students with high levels of academic ability or SES. School resources do explain away part of the effect of family background on college applications and destinations.
However, the results do no give strong support for a policy of increasing material school resources to help disadvantaged students attend college. The results show that AP courses do steer low-SES students toward college (not necessarily to selective colleges), but the effect of a large increase of AP courses on low-SES students' chances of applying to college is moderate. Other material resources do not appreciably affect low-SES students' chances of applying to college or actually attending college. This is not to say that increasing these resources would be a wasted effort, since they could improve other student outcomes, but rather the author finds no evidence that they would increase disadvantaged students' chances of applying to and actually attending nonselective or selective colleges.
In conclusion, the findings suggest that inequalities among public schools provide one tool to affluent families to help their children attend prestigious colleges and obtain educational and occupational success, but ameliorating these school inequalities will probably not do much to ameliorate inequalities among students in college destinations.
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