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Public Versus Private Colleges: Political Participation of College Graduates

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Abstract

Using data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:93/03) of College Graduates, we use structural equation modeling to model the relationships between college major, values held in college, collegiate community service participation, and the post-college political participation of college graduates by public versus private institutions. We use Holland’s Theory of person-environment fit as lens to understand differences in political participation across majors and institutional contexts. Over a 10-year period immediately after receiving the baccalaureate, we find that choice of major and individual values are differentially associated with post-college political participation for private institution graduates when compared to the counterparts at public institutions. We relate our findings to extant literature that highlights the differences in institutional characteristics between public and private colleges and socialization patterns of undergraduates that may inform differences in post-college political participation. Implications for future research are also offered.

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Notes

  1. Smart et al. (2000) noted that generic categories of Education and Engineering were unclassifiable because of individual specialties within broad classifications that represented multiple Holland Types.

  2. It is important to note that voting is not included in our political participation construct. As previously stated, voting is one of the four broad modes of political participation (Verba and Nie 1972), and is often used when created political participation measures (Oesterle et al. 2004; Sinclair-Chapman et al. 2009). However, when we tested the voting item’s contribution to its respective political participation, the factor loadings were 0.17, 0.23, and 0.24 for the 1994, 1997, and 2003 factors respectively.

  3. Not shown but available upon request.

  4. This is a separate analysis where community service hours was the dependent variable and valuing community service is one of forty predictors.

  5. Not shown but available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association which receives funds for its “AERA Grants Program” from the National Science Foundation under #DRL-0634035. Opinions reflect those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies.

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  1. Department of Education Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Education, University of Washington, Box 353600, Seattle, WA, 981051, USA

    Joe L. Lott II., Tiffany Brown & Ismael Fajardo

  2. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Jose Hernandez & Joe P. King

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Lott, J.L., Hernandez, J., King, J.P. et al. Public Versus Private Colleges: Political Participation of College Graduates. Res High Educ 54, 895–929 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-013-9301-z

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