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College Enhancement Strategies and Socioeconomic Inequality

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Abstract

The study provides new information on the relationships between students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, utilization of college enhancement strategies, and subsequent 4-year college enrollment. Enhancement strategies represent student behaviors used to bolster the competitiveness of a college application, such as Advanced Placement exams and a variety of extracurricular activities. By drawing on two national datasets that span the 1990s (NELS) and the 2000s (ELS), the study uncovers how these relationships have changed during a period marked by escalating demand for college and growing class inequality. The findings provide partial evidence of class adaptation (Alon in Am Soc Rev 74:731–755, 2009) based on the combination of increased use of multiple enhancement strategies (“high overall use”) among higher SES students and increased influence of high overall enhancement strategy use in predicting college enrollment, particularly selective college enrollment. Implications are discussed in terms of the higher education system and pervasive social inequality.

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Notes

  1. We originally controlled for parents’ expectations for the student’s attainment, but this variable caused collinearity problems in some analyses, and therefore was dropped from all models for consistency.

  2. Without addressing missing data, approximately 19 % of NELS cases and 39 % of ELS cases would have been dropped via listwise deletion in models for four-year enrollment. Instances of missing data for individual variables reached a high of 19 % in NELS (test score variable) and 35 % in ELS (school free lunch variable).

  3. All sample sizes are rounded to the nearest 10, in accordance with the restricted data license agreement with NCES.

  4. We created a wrapper program in Stata that calculated the predicted probabilities using the margins command separately for each imputation, and then we combined the results using mi estimate. Our approach was informed by the analysis described at http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/faq/ologit_mi_marginsplot.htm. Interested readers may contact the authors for more information.

  5. Simply putting a confidence interval band around each predicted probability line and observing where they overlap would not be an appropriate way to examine group differences and would likely result in incorrectly showing fewer group differences than actually exist (Long 1997, 2009; Schenker and Gentleman 2001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York University, 239 Greene Street, East Building, 2nd Floor, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Gregory C. Wolniak

  2. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, USA

    Ryan S. Wells & Catherine A. Manly

  3. Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, USA

    Mark E. Engberg

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  1. Gregory C. Wolniak
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  2. Ryan S. Wells
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  3. Mark E. Engberg
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  4. Catherine A. Manly
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Correspondence to Gregory C. Wolniak.

Appendix

Appendix

See Appendix Table 5.

Table 5 Survey questions capturing college enhancement strategies: NELS: 88/94 and ELS: 2002/06
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Wolniak, G.C., Wells, R.S., Engberg, M.E. et al. College Enhancement Strategies and Socioeconomic Inequality. Res High Educ 57, 310–334 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9389-4

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