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Counselors, Information, and High School College-Going Culture: Inequalities in the College Application Process

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Abstract

While socioeconomic inequality in postsecondary outcomes is well documented, limited research explores the extent to which seeing a high school counselor can help to reduce inequality in college destinations. In particular, previous research rarely considers the high school context in which counselors and students interact as well as the other sources of social and cultural capital available to students. Using the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS: 2002), we find that seeing a counselor plays a significant role in predicting application to college, and while this relationship is attenuated, it remains strong even net of other sources of information. Moreover, the relationship between seeing a high school counselor and whether and where students apply to college is largely similar across high school contexts, with some indication that high school counselors may be most relevant in schools with moderate college-going culture. Finally, presented analyses provide insights regarding the extent to which different factors contribute to socioeconomic inequality in the college application process.

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  1. Given the high rates of college enrollment of recent high school graduates, considering a high school with a high percent of students attending 2-year colleges as having low college-going culture is consistent with research on college-going culture. Hill (2008) found that schools with low college-going resources and norms had the highest proportion of students attending 2-year colleges. Additionally, students that attended high schools with high resources and low norms and schools with both high resources and norms were less likely to enroll in 2-year colleges than students at schools with low resources and norms.

  2. For those students who applied to a 4-year college, we ran supplemental logistic regression models predicting whether students applied to a highly selective 4-year college. These models produced substantively similar results to those reported herein and are available upon request from the authors.

  3. All sample sizes have been rounded to the nearest 10 in compliance with standards regarding NCES restricted-use data files.

  4. Odds ratios can be calculated as eb (or [eb − 1] * 100 in percentage terms) where b is the logit coefficient.

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Robinson, K.J., Roksa, J. Counselors, Information, and High School College-Going Culture: Inequalities in the College Application Process. Res High Educ 57, 845–868 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-016-9406-2

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