San Diego — As competition for admission to selective colleges has stiffened in recent decades, students have become increasingly sorted among institutions of different prestige levels based on academic ability, according to a study scheduled to be presented here on Thursday at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.
Michael N. Bastedo, an assistant professor of education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Ozan Jaquette, a doctoral candidate at Michigan, based their analysis on data from three nationally representative, long-term surveys: the High School and Beyond Survey of 1980, the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988, and the Educational Longitudinal Survey of 2002. They focused on students who completed high school in 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2004, analyzing changes over time in the relationship between socioeconomic stratification, precollege academic preparation, and the colleges where students end up.
The researchers’ analysis was rooted in “signaling” theory, which holds that education credentials distinguish their holders from competitors for jobs, and the value of a credential is inversely related to the proportion of job applicants possessing it. The researchers hypothesized that the growth in the share of the nation’s population with baccalaureate degrees has caused increased competition for admission to selective institutions that offer such degrees and are considered more prestigious, in part because they are in limited supply.
The researchers actually found that, except for those institutions at the very tip of the prestige pinnacle, selective colleges were serving a larger share of all students in 2004 than they had done in 1982, mainly because the number of colleges considered selective had grown.
But when student data were broken down by socioeconomic status, it was clear that the gains in access to selective colleges were not evenly distributed. The probability that a student from the least advantaged tenth of society would attend a college classified as “very,” “highly,” or “most” competitive did not rise. The enrollment growth for that segment of the population was concentrated at less-prestigious institutions, especially two-year colleges.
Likewise, students from the most advantaged tenth of society became scarcer at two-year colleges and noncompetitive four-year institutions, and a larger share of that segment of the population was being absorbed into the growing number of colleges with high selectivity ratings.
When the data were broken down by students’ level of academic achievement, similar patterns emerged. Over time, a growing share of high-achieving students has enrolled in selective colleges and stayed away from less-prestigious institutions, and a larger share of students of medium or low achievement enrolled in colleges farther down the rankings ladder. —Peter Schmidt
