A study of data collected through the ACT and SATs caught the attention of the New York Times on Saturday. The report looks at the absence of low-income students at selective colleges and universities and notes a strong correlation between income and application patterns. When low-income students from smaller or poorer school districts with fewer resources and opportunities for acceleration were far less likely to apply to competitive schools than their wealthier peers on an equally high level of achievement. Furthermore, the paper's authors, Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery, state that traditional college outreach methods do not seem likely to bring greater parity.
From the abstract:
"[T]he vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university. ..."We demonstrate that these low-income students' application behavior differs greatly from that of their high-income counterparts who have similar achievement. ..."
Hoxby and Avery write that a minority of low-income students defy the typical application behavior of their socioeconomic peers and apply to selective institutions, but the majority who do not tend to "come from districts too small to support selective public high schools ... and are unlikely to encounter a teacher or schoolmate from an older cohort who attended a selective college."
But perhaps most compelling — apart from the clear restatement of a known disparity that is sometimes considered to be at the core of stunted social mobility — is Hoxby and Avery's analysis of current practice:
"[W]idely-used policies — college admissions staff recruiting, college campus visits, college access programs — are likely to be ineffective with [low-income high-achieving students who tend not to apply to selective colleges,] and we suggest policies that will be effective must depend less on geographic concentration of high achievers."
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