Acknowledgments vii Preface xiii Chapter 1. Educational Attainment: Overall Trends, Disparities, and the Public Universities We Study 1 Chapter 2. Bachelor's Degree Attainment on a National Level 20 Chapter 3. Finishing College at Public Universities 32 Chapter 4. Fields of Study, Time-to-Degree, and College Grades 57 Chapter 5. High Schools and "Undermatching" 87 Chapter 6. Test Scores and High School Grades as Predictors 112 Chapter 7. Transfer Students and the Path from Two-Year to Four-Year Colleges 134 Chapter 8. Financial Aid and Pricing on a National Level 149 Chapter 9. Financial Aid at Public Universities 166 Chapter 10. Institutional Selectivity and Institutional Effects 192 Chapter 11. Target Populations 207 Chapter 12. Looking Ahead 223 Appendix A. The Modern Evolution of America's Flagship Universities by Eugene M. Tobin 239 Notes 265 List of Figures 337 List of Tables 347 List of Appendix Tables 349 References 357 Index 377

Crossing the Finish Line:: Completing College at America’s Public Universities (Association for Institutional Research, May 30, 2010)

College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It

MacLeod, Jay. 2009 (3rd ed). Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood. Boulder. CO: Westview Press In Ain't No Making' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (1987) Jay MacLeod expertly shows education's role in the process of social reproduction, or how class inequality passes from one generation to the next. On the jacket cover of the third edition, preeminent sociologists-like William J. Wilson-comment enthusiastically about the updates on subjects' socio-economic status 20+ years after the initial study. They underscore the "classic" status of ANMI in scholarship on structural inequality and social reproduction. For readers unfamiliar with the book, I briefly describe the author's initial study and the contributions from data collected for the second edition. Following this, I discuss the added longitudinal data obtained for the third edition, its important new insights, and the usefulness of this book for courses in several core areas of sociology. In 1982 Jay MacLeod conducted participant observation of two groups of male youth, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. Both lived in a housing project called Clarendon Heights, but the two groups differed in important respects. The Hallways Hangers are predominantly white youth who, at that point in their young lives, openly resisted the American achievement ideology advanced by schools. They were dropouts and underachievers, saw few opportunities for themselves in the economy and other structures of society, and subsequently had no aspirations for a better life. In contrast the Brothers, predominantly black youth, demonstrated their belief in America as a land of opportunity by adopting its cultural norms, institutional rules, and by applying themselves in school (albeit with mixed results). They had strong faith that education would give them the needed human capital to succeed in middle-class jobs. When asked about racism, most believed that collective discrimination was a thing of the past. Any future challenges they faced from prejudicial people could be overcome with focus, hard work, and commitment. By dismissing racism and classism, both groups failed to recognize any structural basis for inequality. MacLeod also shows how the process of social reproduction works in practice. Social structure, he explains, becomes embedded in the "habitus" (Bourdieu) of the lower classes and shapes the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers. Habitus refers to "subjects' dispositions, which reflect a class-based experience and a corresponding social grammar of taste, knowledge, and behavior." Using habitus as a theoretical framework, MacLeod stresses, helps to transcend the dualism that characterizes scholarship on social reproduction. It is not solely one-structure-or the other-agency. Both are responsible for class inequality and its reproduction. (Although MacLeod does concede that structure is primary.) The second edition is based on data collected on the men's lives nine years later, and the comparative racial dimension of this study yields another important insight into the process of social reproduction. The majority of Hallway Hangers and Brothers have jobs in the secondary labor market, with low wages, skill requirements, and irregular work. …

Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood

Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America.

This book is the result of carefully designed research attempting to delineate the various consequences that the existing adolescent culture has on the school, in general, and on secondary education, in particular. The study includes ten different high schools which vary in size from one hundred fifty students to nineteen hundred fifty students per high school. The communities vary from a small town, farming community, population one thousand, to a large city, population a hundred thousand, and a parochial school in Chicago. The data was collected by means of questionnaires given to the high school students at two different times—in the fall of 1957 and in the following spring. Questionnaires were also given to the teachers and sent to the parents. The book, however, concentrates on the analysis of the students' questionnaires. Dr. Coleman and his assistants have done a remarkable job in analyzing the data and

The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education.

This study uses qualitative data to investigate the process of social integration for minority students at a majority white high school and identifies significant gender differences in this process. At this school, integration is the result of processes that occur at two different levels of interaction. On the interpersonal level, African American and Latino/a males and females engage in very different integration strategies. Males are able to gain social status at the school through their participation in athletics and their physical embodiment of the urban ‘‘hip-hop star’’ and also by engaging in strategies to play down negative stereotypes. In contrast, females do not have access to similar avenues for social status and do not engage in such strategies. The organization of the school contributes to these gender differences by facilitating interracial contact for the males under ideal conditions, while providing the females with less opportunity for contact. This study has implications for future work on integrated schools and points to the understudied importance of gender and its relation to organizational context in studies of race relations.

/pdf/only-here-for-the-day-the-social-integration-of-minority-rg3bttk9wu.pdf

Only Here for the Day: The Social Integration of Minority Students at a Majority White High School

Increasing numbers of low-income and minority youth are now pursuing shorter-duration sub-baccalaureate credentials at for-profit trade and technical schools. However, many students drop out of the...

“Why Wait Years to Become Something?” Low-income African American Youth and the Costly Career Search in For-profit Trade Schools

Many minority, first-generation, and low-income students aspire to college; however, the college application process can present a significant obstacle. These students cannot always rely on their p...

/pdf/trusting-each-other-student-counselor-relationships-in-54wtofmfn3.pdf

Trusting Each Other: Student-Counselor Relationships in Diverse High Schools.

Elite higher education institutions work hard to secure diverse classes, and students seek out these institutions in part because they believe that diversity will enhance their own educational expe...

Legitimating Prestige through Diversity: How Higher Education Institutions Represent Ethno-Racial Diversity across Levels of Selectivity

College attendance brings significant financial gain in lifetime earnings, and in order to reap those benefits more students are attending college than ever before. At the same time as more students have been applying to college, the application process itself has changed dramatically in the last few decades. As the last hurdle on the road to college, the application process is a critical step in the overall college-choice process. However, until recently much of the research on college choice gave little attention to the actual steps of college application and did not always attend to variations by race and class. Considering the increasing importance of a college education and the consistent inequalities by race and class in who attends college, research examining how social background affects the ways in which students navigate the college application process is crucial. This review examines what we do know about race and class variation in college application, drawing from literature across sociology, economics, and higher education. This review addresses three questions: how does the admissions and application process affect race and class inequalities in college attendance? How have scholars modeled this process and do these models capture the experiences of students across race and class? And finally, how do students from different social backgrounds vary in their approach to applying to college?

Megan M. Holland

Papers

Only Here for the Day: The Social Integration of Minority Students at a Majority White High School

“Why Wait Years to Become Something?” Low-income African American Youth and the Costly Career Search in For-profit Trade Schools

Trusting Each Other: Student-Counselor Relationships in Diverse High Schools.

Legitimating Prestige through Diversity: How Higher Education Institutions Represent Ethno-Racial Diversity across Levels of Selectivity

Navigating the Road to College: Race and Class Variation in the College Application Process