In a 1991 study, the author found that females were less likely to receive support from their parents for college education if they were fatter than average. This effect is replicated for female undergraduates (n = 576); no effect emerged for males (n = 450). Controlling for income, ethnicity, family size, and number of children attending college did not change the results. The selection bias against fat women was strongest for daughters of political conservatives, a group previously found to endorse antifat attitudes. This suggests that parents' attitudes may lead to discrimination within families. To demonstrate that this may be due to parents' bias, data from a representative sample of high school seniors (n = 3,386) showed no association between politics, weight, and predictors of college attendance, including grade point average, self-rated intelligence and ability, college aspirations, and health. The evidence accumulates that parents are discriminating against their own heavyweight daughters.

Do Parents Discriminate Against their Heavyweight Daughters

David C. McClelland's 1973 article has deeply influenced both professional and public opinion. In it, he presented five major themes: (a) Grades in school did not predict occupational success, (b) intelligence tests and aptitude tests did not predict occupational success or other important life outcomes, (c) tests and academic performance only predicted job performance because of an underlying relationship with social status, (d) such tests were unfair to minorities, and (e) "competencies" would be better able to predict important behaviors than would more traditional tests. Despite the pervasive influence of these assertions, this review of the literature showed only limited support for these claims.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/46/10/1012.pdf

A Reconsideration of Testing for Competence Rather than for Intelligence.

Examines the causes of poverty, paying special attention to the interaction between poverty and racial discrimination.

Poverty and Discrimination.

We present evidence from a recent field experiment in college coaching/ mentoring. We find surprisingly large impacts on college attendance and persistence. We test several theories as to why a short lived intervention has large impacts on lifetime human capital investments. We do not find evidence that the treatment effect derives from simple behavioral mistakes or a lack of easily obtained information. Instead our mentoring program substitutes for the potentially expensive and often missing ingredient of skilled parental or teacher time and encouragement. Our positive effects are concentrated among students who do not rely on parental or teacher support for college applications and who are less extraverted. Our treatments that provide financial incentives or information alone do not appear to be effective. For women, assignment to our mentoring treatment yields a 15 percentage point increase in the college going rate while treatment on the treated estimates are 30 percentage points (against a control complier mean rate of 43 percent). We find much smaller treatment effects for men and the difference in treatment effects across genders is partially explained by the differential in self-reported labor market opportunities.

Why Do College Going Interventions Work

Research shows that middle school is an important juncture for a student where he or she starts to be conscious about academic achievement and thinks about college attendance. It is already known that access to financial resources, family background, career aspirations and academic ability are indicative of a student’s choice to attend college; though these variables are interesting, they do not necessarily give sufficient actionable information to instructors or guidance counselors to intervene for individual students. However, increasing numbers of students are using educational software at this phase of their education, and detectors of specific aspects of student learning and engagement have been developed for these types of learning environments. If these types of models can be used to predict college attendance, it may provide more actionable information than the previous generation of predictive models. In this paper, we predict college attendance from these types of detectors, in the context of 3,747 students using the ASSISTment system in New England, producing detection that is both successful and potentially more actionable than previous approaches; we can distinguish between a student who will attend college and a student who will not attend college 68.6% of the time.

https://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2013/papers/rn_paper_26.pdf

Predicting College Enrollment from Student Interaction with an Intelligent Tutoring System in Middle School.

Three factors that may influence a high school graduate's decision to attend college are considered: (1) his ability, (2) the cost of attending college, and (3) the socioeconomic status of his parents. The results, based on a probit analysis, indicate that factors (1) and (3) are strong influences on the probability of attending college. Among the socioeconomic variables, however, family income is the least important influence on college attendance. The low income elasticity of demand for college implies that unrestricted income transfers to the low income population would not be an effective way of increasing their rate of college attendance.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1856612_code1653585.pdf?abstractid=1856612&mirid=1&type=2

Factors Affecting College Attendance

Three factors that may influence a high school graduate's decision to attend college are considered: (1)his ability, (2) the cost of attending college, and (3) the socioeconomic status of his parents. The results, based on a probit analysis, indicate that factors (1) and (3) are strong influences on the probability of attending college. Among the socioeconomic variables, however, family income is the least important influence on college attendance. The low income elasticity of demand for college implies that unrestricted income transfers to the low income population would not be an effective way of increasing their rate of college attendance. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMAR Y This paper is an addition to the empirical studies of the variables that influence whether high school graduates go on to attend college (see [2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]). We consider three major factors which might influence a youth's decision to attend college: high ability, the cost of attending college, and the socioeconomic status of his parents. Measures of ability and socioeconomic status have been the principal explanatory variables used by the previous studies This study was initiated by the late John Melder as part of his proposed Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin and was completed by Sandra Christensen and Burton A. Weisbrod. Christensen is Assistant Professor of Economics, Simon Fraser University, and Weisbrod is Professor of Economics and of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, and a Fellow of the University's Institute for Research on Poverty. * This study was supportec by funds granted to the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, by the Office of Economic Opportunity pursuant to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964; by the University of Wisconsin Center for Studies in Vocational and Technical Education; and by the Computer Science Center, University of Maryland. The opinions expressed are those of the authors. However, we wish to thank the editors and referees of this Journal for a number of variable comments and suggestions. [Manuscript received February 1973; accepted June 1974.] The Journal of Human Resources * X * 2 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:25:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Christensen and Others 1 175 cited. Fenske's [4] is the only one to attempt to take cost factors into consideration, in the form of college accessibility. However, he fails to include income, an important component of the family's socioeconomic status, in his analysis. A Carnegie Commission monograph [1], published after work on this paper was well under way, includes a thorough analysis of college attendance for Wisconsin and other areas. The authors of that study consider the same factors considered here-ability, socioeconomic status, and college accessibility. We shall refer to the results of this monograph later, in comparison with our results. Our results indicate that ability and socioeconomic status are strong and consistent influences on the probability of attending college. However, among the socioeconomic variables, family income is the least important in fostering college attendance. The low income elasticity of demand for college implies that unrestricted income transfers to the low income population would not be an effective way of reducing the disparity in college attendance rates between youths from high status families relative to those from low status families. There is some indication that lower attendance rates for females, relative to males, might be eliminated by increasing the availability of local public college facilities. Since the local college provides a relatively low cost education, we use the estimated response to its presence or absence as a measure of the price elasticity of demand for college. Our results seem to indicate that the price elasticity is high for females, but virtually zero for males. DESCRIPTION OF DATA AND METHODS OF ANAL YSIS In our analysis, socioeconomic status is represented by four separate variables: family income, occupation of the father, and the educational level of the father and of the mother. The socioeconomic variables are thought to influence a youth's college decision in two ways: First, family income is the primary determinant of resources available to finance an education and should, therefore, be positively related to college attendance. Second, the level of education and, perhaps, the occupation of his parents would likely be closely related to the amount of parental encouragement to attend college the youth perceives; hence, education and occupational status' should also be positively related to college attendance. A rough measure of the effect that cost or price has on college attendance can be obtained from the set of dummy variables used to represent the kind of college facility which exists in the youth's community. If no public college exists, the student must either attend a nearby private college or board away 1 We consider the professional and managerial occupations to be high status. Workers in the clerical, sales, skilled, unskilled, and laborer occupations are increasingly lower status jobs. Our final occupational category, for farmers, is of mixed status, since it is composed of farm owners, managers, and workers. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:25:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 176 I THE JOURNAL OF HUMAN RESOURCES from home in order to attend a public college in another community. In either case, the cost of college attendance is likely to be higher than if a public college were located nearby. The presence of a four-year public university offers the least costly education if the student seeks to complete a degree, since the student may reside at home throughout the period of attendance. A two-year university extension offers an equally low cost education for the first two years, but to complete the degree the student must transfer to a four-year campus in another community. Because of transportation and boarding costs, the student with only a university extension in his community faces a higher price for the third and fourth years of college than does the student with a four-year university in his community. The student with only a two-year county college in his community faces a still higher price for his education since there is only limited transferability of credits from a county college to a university. Thus, we would expect youths from communities where a four-year university is present to have the highest probability of attending college, after controlling for other determinants; youths from communities with only a county college or with no public college should have the lowest probability of attending college, after controlling for other determinants. However, it is not possible to control completely for other determinants. In particular, the dummies used to represent the type of public college facility accessible to the youth may confound college accessibility with other community characteristics which also affect attendance rates. The Anderson-Bowman-Tinto [1] study indicates that this problem can be mitigated (though not eliminated) by controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, as we do. Ability is measured by two variables: high school class rank and score on a standardized scholastic aptitude test. The test used was the Henmon-Nelson Self Administering Test of Mental Ability. These variables should be positively related to the youth's probability of attending college, since his ability is a large factor in determining the return (either in enjoyment or increased earning power) he can expect from additional education. The data we used to study the importance of these influences were collected in part by Robert Fenske [4]. He gathered information on ability and parental characteristics for high school seniors living in selected Wisconsin cities in May 1963. Four years later, a follow-up study was made by Norman Dufty and Richard Whinfield, of the University of Wisconsin Center for Studies in Vocational and Technical Education, to determine which of the students originally surveyed had attended college. Subsequently, income data for a random sample of the youths' families for the years 1959 through 1965 were obtained from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue by John Melder. The result was a sample of 440 high school graduates-208 females and 232 males.2 2 Mean values of the variables are in Table 4. A correlation matrix as well as the variance and minimum and maximum values for each variable are available from the authors on

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/144825.pdf

Factors affecting college attendance

This paper attempts to provide benchmarks by which we may measure our progress toward eliminating racial discrimination in the labor market Using projected labor force data, classified by race, sex, and education, we define nondiscriminatory black-white occupational patterns and earnings ratios to the year 2000 We also detail the occupational patterns and earnings ratios which would prevail if labor market discrimination continues unchanged from its 1965 level Neither of these projections is thought to be a realistic estimate of what will actually happen in the labor market over the coming years; rather, they are designed to serve as standards against which we can measure our performance

Sandra Christensen

Papers

Factors Affecting College Attendance

Factors affecting college attendance

The Black-White Earnings Gap