The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Empirical research on the decision to attend college is predicated largely on the assumption that students make conscious, utility-maximizing decisions about their educational careers. For many students this may not be the case; in fact, the authors find that a large share of students assume from a young age that they will attend college, exhibiting what might be called a college-going habitus. Consistent with critical arguments about how social class is reproduced, the authors find that white, native-born children of college-educated parents are more likely to take college for granted than their less advantaged peers. Students with a college-going habitus are more likely than others to apply to a four-year college by spring of their senior year in high school. Although social origin accounts for some of the association between habitus and college application, both advantaged and disadvantaged students appear to benefit from a college-going habitus.

Braddock’s perpetuation hypothesis argues that racial segregation is self-perpetuated over the life cycle and across institutional settings. Studies examining the relationship between segregation and college choice consistently show that black students who attend segregated schools are more likely to choose predominantly black colleges over predominantly white colleges. This study extends previous research by considering not only blacks but also Hispanics, Asians, and whites. Consistent with Braddock’s claim, results show a positive association between the ethno-racial composition of schools and first college preference for all demographic groups considered. However, this association disappears for blacks and Hispanics after controlling for the ethno-racial composition of the nearest two- and four-year colleges. These findings indicate that geographic context better explains the perpetuation of segregation than same-group preferences.

The authors uses administrative data for the two most selective Texas public institutions to examine the application, admission, and enrollment consequences of rescinding affirmative action and implementing the top 10 percent admission regime. The authors simulate the gains and losses associated with each policy regime and those from assigning minorities the corresponding rates for white students. Challenging popular claims that the Top Ten Percent Law restored diversification of Texas’s public flagships, analyses that consider both changes in the size of high school graduation cohorts and institutional carrying capacity show that the uniform admission regime did not restore Hispanic and black representation at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M even after four years. Simulations of gains and losses for Hispanics and blacks at each stage of the college pipeline across admission regimes confirm that affirmative action is the most efficient policy to diversify college campuses, even in highly segregated states like Texas.

By guaranteeing college admission to all students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class, Texas H.B. 588 replaced an opaque de facto practice of admitting nearly all top 10 percent graduates with a transparent de jure policy that required public institutions to admit all applicants eligible for the guarantee. The new admission regime sent a clear message to students attending high schools that previously sent few students to the Texas flagships. Using 18 years of administrative data to examine sending patterns, we find a sizeable decrease in the concentration of flagship enrollees originating from select feeder schools and growing shares of enrollees originating from high schools located in rural areas, small towns, and midsize cities, as well as from schools with concentrations of poor and minority students. For new sending schools, we find substantial year-to-year persistence in sending behavior, which increased after the top 10 percent policy was implemented.

College major choice varies substantially by gender, race, and ethnicity among college graduates. This study investigates whether these differences are present at the start of the college career and whether they can be explained by variation in academic preparation. It estimates a multinomial logit to evaluate whether students of similar academic backgrounds make similar college major choices at the start of their college career. The results demonstrate that significant differences by gender, race, and ethnicity persist in initial college major choice even after controlling for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score of the student and the high school class rank of the student. Gender differences in major choice are much larger than racial and ethnic disparities. Furthermore, women are significantly more likely to switch away from an initial major in engineering than are white men.

Studies about college majors largely ignore non-citizen or immigrant populations. Using the administrative data from two public universities in Texas, the author examine students’ major choices by citizen status. In the context of legislation providing in-state tuition access for undocumented students (H.B. 1403, effective 2001), the author tests the effects of the policy on students’ choices of major. Foreign-born populations have a higher propensity to select majors in Science, Engineering and Math (SEM) and a lower propensity to enroll in social sciences than citizens. Domestic students exhibit variable propensities to opt for SEMs, depending on their race. There is evidence of behavioral changes pre— to post—H.B. 1403, with foreign-born populations shifting away from high-return majors.

Using ten years of enrollment data at four Texas public universities, the authors examine whether, to what extent, and in what ways high school attended contributes to racial and ethnic differences in college achievement. As with previous studies, the authors show that controlling for class rank and test scores shrinks, but does not eliminate, sizable racial differences in college achievement. Fixed-effects models that take into account differences across high schools that minority and nonminority youth attend largely eliminate, and often reverse, black-white and Hispanic-white gaps in several college outcomes. The results, which are quite robust across universities of varying selectivity, illustrate how high school quality foments race and ethnic inequality in college performance.

In this article, the author estimates the causal effect of attending a selective college on a student’s academic performance. The results differ from previous studies because the author estimates a local effect, identified only for students who enroll in a selective college but would not have been able to do so without the guaranteed admissions granted to them by Texas’s Top Ten Percent Law. Differing from many previous studies, the author finds significant negative effects of attending a selective college on the following measures: first- and sixth-semester grade point average, probability of completing the sixth semester, and graduation probability.

This article examines the male disadvantage in grade point average, credits earned, and persistence in college. Using data on enrollees in Florida and Texas four-year colleges to decompose gender differentials in the first semester, changes in the differentials between semesters, and persistence through college, we find that males earn lower GPAs and credits in their first semester of college largely because they arrive with lower high school grades. After the first semester, males fall further behind their female counterparts in grades and credits. Females’ better high school grades explain some of the widened gender disparity in performance but differences in college course-taking and majors also explain gender gaps in credits, grades, persistence, and graduation.