IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/cshedu/qt9bh075r1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inequality, Student Achievement, and College Admissions: A Remedy for Underrepresentation

Author

Listed:
  • Studley, Roger

Abstract

Large socioeconomic and ethnic disparities exist in college admissions. This paper demonstrates that by systematically accounting for the effect of socioeconomic circumstance on pre-college achievement, colleges can substantially reduce these disparities. A conceptual model distinguishes students' realized achievement from their underlying ability (inclusive of effort and motivation) and relates achievement differences to both ability and socioeconomic circumstance. The model shows that an admissions policy that systematically accounts for the relationship between circumstance and achievement can significantly increase the representation of socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students. Empirical findings using California data confirm this result: socioeconomic circumstance is strongly related to pre-college achievement, and much of the ethnic disparity in achievement, as measured by SAT I scores and high school grade point averages, can be attributed to circumstance. The estimated relationship between circumstance and achievement is used to construct alternative measures of achievement that account for the influence of circumstance. Simulation of admissions policies demonstrates that, by relying on such measures, a college can greatly reduce socioeconomic and ethnic underrepresentation among admitted students.

Suggested Citation

  • Studley, Roger, 2003. "Inequality, Student Achievement, and College Admissions: A Remedy for Underrepresentation," University of California at Berkeley, Center for Studies in Higher Education qt9bh075r1, Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley.
  • Handle: RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt9bh075r1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/9bh075r1.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rita Asplund & Oussama Ben Adbelkarim & Ali Skalli, 2008. "An equity perspective on access to, enrolment in and finance of tertiary education," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(3), pages 261-274.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt9bh075r1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://escholarship.org/uc/cshe/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.