Abstract
Using the College Board SAT registration and questionnaire data of 2010 high school graduating seniors, we found clear patterns by race/ethnicity and parental education on two outcomes: out-of-state score-sending and out-of-state college attendance. White students had the highest rates and Hispanic students had the lowest rates, and there was a clear gradient by parental education with the students with college-educated parents having the highest rates of out-of-state score sending and college attendance. Substantial differences by race/ethnicity and parental education still persist after considering students’ family income, academic preparation, high school characteristics and state of residence. State-specific estimates show that Hispanic and Asian students’ low likelihood of out-of-state college-going based on all SAT takers are largely driven by students’ choices in a few states where they are highly concentrated or their presence are substantial. In contrast, the concentration of Black students and presence of HBCUs in a state seem irrelevant to whether Black students stay or leave home states for college. It seems that high performing Black and Hispanic students and those with parents lacking a Bachelor’s degree gained much in their access to a private and selective college by leaving their home states.
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Notes
We restrict to students attending high schools in the U.S.
Students receiving an SAT fee waiver for the test can send scores to up to 8 institutions at no cost to them. http://sat.collegeboard.org/register/sat-fee-waivers.
Students can take SAT multiple times, we capture all score-sending requests in this study; however, the SAT scores used in multivariate analyses were the most recent test scores.
Because students do not have to send SAT scores to colleges (they can send ACT scores, and they can apply and attend a test-optional colleges including those that do not require test scores) using SAT score-sending likely understates students’ college intentions. Some students might perform better on the ACT, and therefore opt to send ACT scores only. However, the number of SAT takers sending no SAT scores but other test scores to postsecondary institutions is likely to be small.
Few students sent scores to in-state institutions and institutions abroad/in U.S. territory. To simplify grouping, we classified these students into the category of “both in- and out-of-state.”
This group of students includes both students who indeed did not attend any colleges/universities and a small number of students who attended an institution not in NSC data, including those abroad and in U.S. territories.
Family income is an important component of socioeconomic status, and it is also a deciding factor of college location choice (Postsecondary Education Opportunity 1996a). However, over one-third of SAT takers did not answer the question on family income, and it is questionable how well high school students know about their parents’ income; therefore in this paper, we choose to focus on parental education, a strong correlate of family income, and use student reported family income as a covariate.
Out-of-state migration is considered to have long-lasting implications for local and state economies regarding higher education revenues and spending and the availability of highly skilled labor forces (Cooke and Boyle 2011).
Results are available upon request.
When we calculate the percentages considering all five score-sending categories, the major patterns in out-of-state score-sending and college attendance by race/ethnicity and by parental education are consistent with those reported here.
It is likely that we under-estimate this number if institutions abroad are missing an institution code in the SAT data or if students choose not to send SAT scores to institutions abroad.
National Center for Education Statistics (2000, 2010) report that about 20 % first-time freshmen attended colleges outside of their home states, and that the rates were fairly stable over the past decade. Our analyses show that, among 2010 high school graduating seniors taking the SAT, the out-of-state college-going rate among college enrollees was about 23 %, this higher out-of-state college going rate likely reflects that students taking the SAT (and other college admissions tests) are higher achievers compared to those students taking no such tests.
Over 60 % of these students attended a 2-year institution based on an auxiliary analysis.
Nevertheless, a multinomial logit model considering “both in- and out-of-state” and “out-of-state only” categories were also estimated, the results are available upon request. For both categories of students, the patterns by race/ethnicity and by parental education were consistent with those reported here, though the differentials by race/ethnicity were somewhat greater among those only sending scores to out-of-state institutions.
Using a seemingly unrelated estimation procedure, we formally test whether the estimates of race/ethnicity and parental education categories obtained on score-sending outcomes are different from those obtained on the college attendance outcome. With the exception of “parental education: AA or some college” category, estimates of all race/ethnicity and parental education categories are significantly different. However, the magnitude of differences are larger for “parental education: BA or higher” category and become even larger when we expanded the model sequentially.
In addition to the racial concentration and the presence of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, state policies also affect minority students’ out-of-state college-going decisions. In particular, in the late 1990s, California and Texas banned the use of affirmative action measures in college admissions, which has resulted Black and Hispanic enrollment drops at public institutions (e.g., Tienda et al. 2003; Long 2007; Hinrichs 2012; Arcidiacono et al. 2012). These policies were considered contributing factors that drove highly qualified minorities out-of-state (e.g., Orfield 1998; Santos et al. 2010). Nonetheless, we still find that Hispanic and Asian students in California had a stronger preference to stay compared to those in other states.
These low odds might be the result of strong preferences of staying with their own race/ethnicity groups as well as other unique characteristics of the states appearing very attractive to Hispanics and Asians. For example, California offers one of the strongest public post-secondary education systems (Kodrzycki 2001), and New Jersey is within easy access to several greater metro areas on the east coast (Cooke and Boyle 2011).
We also explored academic under-matching that has attracted much attention recently (Roderick et al. 2008; Bowen et al. 2009; Bastedo and Jaquette 2011; Smith et al. 2012). Following a simpler operational definition of the “individual-institutional fit” (Long 2004), we define under-matching as a student’ SAT scores are above 75th percentile of incoming freshmen at the institution attended. We found that, among high performing students, under-matching was substantially lower among those leaving their home states for college.
Although academic preparation is an important correlate of out-of-state college attendance, other factors are important too. To rigorously examine whether students going out-of-state for college indeed attend a better institution than comparable students staying in their home states, propensity score matching methods using state-specific data could be an option.
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Acknowledgment
This research was supported by The College Board; the author is free in conducting the research, and author’ opinion does not necessarily reflect The College Board’s position. The author is grateful for the comments from Mary McKillip and Jennifer Merriman.
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Niu, S.X. Leaving Home State for College: Differences by Race/Ethnicity and Parental Education. Res High Educ 56, 325–359 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-014-9350-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-014-9350-y