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More Girls Go to College: Exploring the Social and Academic Factors Behind the Female Postsecondary Advantage Among Hispanic and White Students

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Abstract

This study examines the female postsecondary advantage in matriculation among Hispanic and white youth with the goal of exploring whether social capital, in addition to academic performance and orientation, function similarly to help explain females’ higher likelihood of college attendance for each group. Utilizing data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (THEOP), results indicate that girls’ higher academic performance in high school is an important factor behind their subsequent gender advantage in 4-year college attendance, particularly for Hispanic students. Additionally, compared to their co-ethnic male peers, Hispanic and white girls have greater levels of social capital, such as more academically-focused friendship groups in high school, that are associated with higher rates of college attendance. However, girls’ greater frequency of discussion with high school counselors about college appears to contribute to the female advantage in matriculation only for Hispanic students. For both groups, the analyses suggest that all of the factors considered explain substantially less of the female advantage in 2-year college matriculation than they do for the female advantage in 4-year matriculation. In general, the results underscore the need for more research considering the complex processes through which gender and race/ethnicity intersect in shaping individuals’ paths to college.

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Notes

  1. Buchmann and Diprete (2006) focus primarily on gender differences in college completion rather than enrollment, and find for example, that black women have less of a gender advantage than white women in academic performance during the college years, and therefore suggest that other unidentified factors may be more important in explaining the gender difference in completion among minority students.

  2. For example, while focusing on black–white differences, Buchmann and Diprete (2006) include both Asian and Hispanic students in an aggregate “other race” category due to their low representation in the data.

  3. Due to data limitations, subsequent enrollment after this initial period cannot be measured. Yet it is important to point out that while many students defer college for one or more years after high school, doing so has negative consequences for the likelihood of completing a degree, particularly for those students who are not from a high social class background (Bozick and DeLuca 2005). Therefore, college enrollment in the fall immediate to high school completion offers students the best chances for ultimate postsecondary success. Additionally, art, beauty, and vocational and trade schools were included with the category of two-year colleges. However, in analyses not shown here, students who attended these schools were re-assigned to the contrast category for ‘no college’. This did not substantially change any of the key results reported here.

  4. This variable was not included in the analyses of white students as less than 5% of them identified themselves as immigrants.

  5. To test whether the coefficients for the variables measuring academic orientation were significantly different between groups, I employed both pooled models with interaction effects between ethnicity and academic orientation, as well as the suest command in STATA. These tests are comparable and yielded the same results.

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Acknowledgments

This research uses data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (THEOP) and acknowledges the following agencies that made THEOP data available through grants and support: Ford Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation (NSF Grant # SES-0350990), The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD Grant # R24H0047879), and The Office of Population Research at Princeton University. The author wishes to thank participants at the THEOP Research Conference at Princeton, Kelly Raley, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Texas At Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Catherine Riegle-Crumb

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Riegle-Crumb, C. More Girls Go to College: Exploring the Social and Academic Factors Behind the Female Postsecondary Advantage Among Hispanic and White Students. Res High Educ 51, 573–593 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-010-9169-0

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