Karly Ford | Pennsylvania State University (original) (raw)
Books by Karly Ford
Race Ethnicity and Education, 2019
Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who id... more Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who identify with two or more racial categories. However, the 2000 Census was the first time individuals could ‘officially’ identify belonging to more than one racial cate- gory. Governmentally regulated racial naming of individuals has long been a contested issue. This tradition continues as higher education institutions have been federally mandated since 2010 to report data on individuals who self-select two or more races. In choosing how to represent these data, institutions contribute to racial projects that develop and mold understandings of the nature and meaning of ‘multiracial.’ In this article, we analyze 227 univer- sity websites to illustrate the range of ways in which this racial project is currently ongoing. Though we can only speculate about how these projects may impact future racial understandings, we capitalize on this timely moment in nationwide conceptualization.
Educational Researcher, 2019
Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers... more Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers often are interested in understanding whether policies expand access for low-income students. In this brief, we highlight the limitations of a commonly available measure of low-income status—whether students receive a federal Pell grant—and compare it to new data on enrollment by income quintile to evaluate a recent policy effort within elite colleges aimed at expanding access. We demonstrate that Pell is a rough measure of low-income status and that without more detailed data on colleges’ economic diversity, policy evaluations focusing on existing Pell data will suffer from measurement error and potentially miss enrollment effects for moderate- and high-income students.
Improving Learning Environments provides the first systematic comparative cross-national study of... more Improving Learning Environments provides the first systematic comparative cross-national study of school disciplinary climates. In this volume, leading international social science researchers explore nine national case studies to identify the institutional determinants of variation in school discipline, the possible links between school environments and student achievement, as well as the implications of these findings for understanding social inequality.
As the book demonstrates, a better understanding of school discipline is essential to the formation of effective educational policies. Ultimately, to improve a school's ability to contribute to youth socialization and student internalization of positive social norms and values, any changes in school discipline must not only be responsive to behavior problems but should also work to enhance the legitimacy and moral authority of school actors.
Stanford University Press, Jun 13, 2012 - Education - 337 pages
This second edition of The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education draws f... more This second edition of The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education draws from classic and contemporary scholarship to examine current issues and diverse theoretical approaches to studying the effects of schooling on individuals and society. This engaging reader exposes students to examples of sociological research on schools with a focus on the school as community. It covers a wide range of issues, including the development and application of social and cultural capital; the effects of racial segregation and resource inequality on student outcomes; the effects of tracking; the role of gender, class, and race in structuring educational opportunity; the effects of schooling on life course outcomes; the significance of a school's institutional environment; and the sociology of school reform movements.
Papers by Karly Ford
Educational Leadership, 2012
Higher education researchers struggle with how to handle missing student ethnoracial data. Withou... more Higher education researchers struggle with how to handle missing student ethnoracial data. Without race data, they have trouble making comparisons across groups. However, dropping "race unknown" students from analyses potentially introduces bias into conclusions. There is little methodological discussion about how to proceed when faced with large numbers of missing student ethnoracial data. An important but so far unstudied question is: what are the characteristics of those college students that end up in the "race unknown" category? This research note examines how these students compare to others who do provide a racial identification to get a better sense of how counting or not counting these students may affect results. Additionally, using students' responses to two different questions about racial identification, we are able to examine differences within the proportion of students who might be counted as "race unknown." Our results suggest that Multiracial and White students make up significant percentages of "race unknown" college students in surveys. We also find that there are differences within the "race unknown" population. Every study of higher education will encounter student non-response on race and ethnicity, so this study is a useful one for researchers and policymakers alike.
Policy Futures in Education, 2021
Policy researchers have difficulty understanding stratification in enrollment in US higher educat... more Policy researchers have difficulty understanding stratification in enrollment in US higher education when race and ethnicity data are plagued by missing values. Students who decline to ethnoracially self-identify become part of a “race unknown” reporting category. In undergraduate enrollment, “race unknown” students are not randomly distributed and are highest among the most selective universities. In this “Policy Research Note,” we investigate these patterns at US law schools to understand if they are driven by selectivity. We find that the most competitive law schools, on average, report 8% of their students are race unknown, double the rate of other law schools. We argue that race unknown enrollment cannot be ignored when studying ethnoracial enrollments in higher education because it varies systematically by institutional type and may mask actual rates of ethnoracial diversity. We posit that the race unknown category is likely produced by a combination of individual and institut...
Research in Higher Education, 2021
Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student b... more Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student bodies; however, the higher education system is highly stratified. In this paper, we seek to understand stratification in the wake of the Great Recession by examining enrollment among students from differing income backgrounds by institutional type. Two theoretical frameworks suggest different conclusions. A Disaster Capitalism framework suggests that in places where the recession was most severe, enrollment by income would become more stratified than in places where the downturn was less severe. In contrast, Effectively Maintained Inequality would suggest that enrollments were already effectively stratified by income and would not necessarily be sensitive to exposure to an economic shock. Employing fixed effects modeling and novel data based on the tax records of 30 million Americans, we examine income composition by institutional type from 2004 to 2012. We find that although stratification by institutional type worsened during the recession and subsequent recovery, patterns of economic stratification were not more intense for institutions that enrolled students from states hardest hit by the recession. We conclude that these patterns are consistent with an Effectively Maintained Inequality framework. During the recession, the top quintiles continued to enjoy their longstanding disproportionate enrollment in the most selective institutions. For the bottom quintiles, the longstanding marginalization from 4-year college going persisted through the recession. These stratification patterns, however, were not more pronounced in places hardest hit by the recession.
The Journal of Higher Education, 2020
ABSTRACT Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic r... more ABSTRACT Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria—excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations—that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehensive approach to admissions may do little to ameliorate—and in some cases, may exacerbate—existing enrollment inequities. We also find that moving away from test scores and focusing on academic rigor represent potentially promising strategies for expanding access at some institutions.
Educational Researcher, 2020
Many postsecondary datasets collect gender data in ways that are not inclusive of all students. M... more Many postsecondary datasets collect gender data in ways that are not inclusive of all students. Many trans* students, those who identify as trans women, trans men, genderqueer, among other gender identities, are excluded when surveys collect gender data using only two categories. The American Bar Association recently became the first sector of higher education to collect and report enrollment data using three gender categories for all U.S. law schools. Between 2014 and 2019, there was a steady rise in the number of law schools that reported enrolling students in the “other” gender category. We interpret this growth to signify that law schools are beginning to collect data on students who were already there, not a reflection of exponential growth in trans* enrollment in law school. A more inclusive approach to gender data collection is necessary to better understand the educational trajectories of trans* students. However, data collection alone is not sufficient and may in fact be pr...
Higher Education, 2020
Universities in the USA must navigate a complex set of organizational goals when communicating ab... more Universities in the USA must navigate a complex set of organizational goals when communicating about international students. On one hand, international students signal that the university has a global reach and diverse student body; on the other hand, international students have been viewed as edging out domestic students for access to scarce resources. How do US universities frame and reframe the fraught narrative around international students? We examined the websites of over 160 large universities in the USA and collected screenshots of how international students were represented. Using an academic capitalism framing, we understand universities to be neoliberal actors focused on securing their status position and generating economic growth. In this way, our findings show how international students have come to be framed as consonant with multiple organizational missions and goals. These goals include being viewed as global/cosmopolitan, ethnically diverse and financially sound. International students are in this sense are discursively constructed through these representations, framed as markers of prestige and legitimacy, as well as a means of economic stimulus. We also find that they are rarely presented as ordinary or unremarkable participants in a campus community alongside their domestic counterparts, marked instead by these exceptional narratives that reframe them in ways that serve institutional goals.
Minerva, 2020
Over the course of the 20 th century, unprecedented growth in scientific discovery was fueled by ... more Over the course of the 20 th century, unprecedented growth in scientific discovery was fueled by broad growth in the number of university-based scientists. During this period the American undergraduate enrollment rate and number of universities with STEM graduate programs each doubled three times and the annual volume of new PhDs doubled six times. This generated the research capacity that allowed the United States to surpass early European-dominated science production and lead for the rest of the century. Here, we focus on origins in the organizational environment and institutional dynamics instead of conventional economic factors. We argue that three trends of such dynamics in the development of American higher education not often considered together—mass undergraduate education, decentralized founding of universities, and flexible mission charters for PhD training—form a process characterized by a term coined here: access symbiosis . Then using a 90-year data series on STEM PhD production and institutional development, we demonstrate the historical progression of these mutually beneficial trends. This access symbiosis in the U.S., and perhaps versions of it in other nations, is likely one critical component of the integration of higher education development with the growing global capacity for scientific discovery. These results are discussed in terms of the contributions of American universities to the Century of Science, recent international trends, and its future viability.
Educational Researcher, 2020
One ethnoracial reporting category perplexes higher education researchers: “race and ethnicity un... more One ethnoracial reporting category perplexes higher education researchers: “race and ethnicity unknown.” Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), we constructed a 28-year panel of 4,401 institutions. We find that the for-profit sector ranges from 5% to 18% “race unknown” students. In addition, almost 10% of students attending the most selective institutions were reported as “race unknown” in 2009 before dropping off precipitously. The size of the “race unknown” category can be attributed to some combination of student responses and data collection practices. We suggest researchers refrain from dropping “race unknown” from their studies as doing so may bias findings for the other ethnoracial categories, especially when comparing rates of student enrollment across institutional types.
The Journal of Higher Education, 2020
ABSTRACT Elite higher education institutions work hard to secure diverse classes, and students se... more ABSTRACT Elite higher education institutions work hard to secure diverse classes, and students seek out these institutions in part because they believe that diversity will enhance their own educational experiences. Institutional theories would predict that practices set by the elite institutions in the field would isomorphically trickle down, however, case studies of individual institutions indicate that higher education structures and cultures vary significantly across the spectrum of selectivity. Do all higher education institutions market their ethno-racial diversity to prospective students in the same ways as elite institutions? Are higher education institutions trying to send similar messages about their ethno-racial diversity or does this vary by selectivity level? This paper provides an examination of higher education at the organizational field level in order to answer questions that have previously been at the institutional level. Through analyzing the admissions webpages at 278 universities across the United States, we find that more selective institutions are more likely to represent their diversity, and more likely to engage in practices that emphasize their traditionally under-represented minority student populations than less selective institutions, though it is the less selective institutions that have higher populations of these students. We argue that variations in institutional habitus across selectivity help to explain these differences.
Industry and Higher Education, 2020
Policy discussions in the United States on the link between college majors and earnings have unde... more Policy discussions in the United States on the link between college majors and earnings have under-appreciated the role of cognitive skills. This study uses the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a unique data set that contains information on individual cognitive skills, college majors and earnings to investigate the relationships between them. The authors find that variation in numeracy and literacy skills is significantly associated with earnings for graduates of the same major. Also, there is an interactional effect between majors and cognitive skills to explain earnings. The findings shed light on the importance of considering cognitive skills when assessing the relationship between college majors and labour market outcomes.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2018
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2019
Race Ethnicity and Education, 2019
Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who id... more Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who identify with two or more racial categories. However, the 2000 Census was the first time individuals c...
Race Ethnicity and Education, 2019
Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who id... more Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who identify with two or more racial categories. However, the 2000 Census was the first time individuals could ‘officially’ identify belonging to more than one racial cate- gory. Governmentally regulated racial naming of individuals has long been a contested issue. This tradition continues as higher education institutions have been federally mandated since 2010 to report data on individuals who self-select two or more races. In choosing how to represent these data, institutions contribute to racial projects that develop and mold understandings of the nature and meaning of ‘multiracial.’ In this article, we analyze 227 univer- sity websites to illustrate the range of ways in which this racial project is currently ongoing. Though we can only speculate about how these projects may impact future racial understandings, we capitalize on this timely moment in nationwide conceptualization.
Educational Researcher, 2019
Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers... more Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers often are interested in understanding whether policies expand access for low-income students. In this brief, we highlight the limitations of a commonly available measure of low-income status—whether students receive a federal Pell grant—and compare it to new data on enrollment by income quintile to evaluate a recent policy effort within elite colleges aimed at expanding access. We demonstrate that Pell is a rough measure of low-income status and that without more detailed data on colleges’ economic diversity, policy evaluations focusing on existing Pell data will suffer from measurement error and potentially miss enrollment effects for moderate- and high-income students.
Improving Learning Environments provides the first systematic comparative cross-national study of... more Improving Learning Environments provides the first systematic comparative cross-national study of school disciplinary climates. In this volume, leading international social science researchers explore nine national case studies to identify the institutional determinants of variation in school discipline, the possible links between school environments and student achievement, as well as the implications of these findings for understanding social inequality.
As the book demonstrates, a better understanding of school discipline is essential to the formation of effective educational policies. Ultimately, to improve a school's ability to contribute to youth socialization and student internalization of positive social norms and values, any changes in school discipline must not only be responsive to behavior problems but should also work to enhance the legitimacy and moral authority of school actors.
Stanford University Press, Jun 13, 2012 - Education - 337 pages
This second edition of The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education draws f... more This second edition of The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education draws from classic and contemporary scholarship to examine current issues and diverse theoretical approaches to studying the effects of schooling on individuals and society. This engaging reader exposes students to examples of sociological research on schools with a focus on the school as community. It covers a wide range of issues, including the development and application of social and cultural capital; the effects of racial segregation and resource inequality on student outcomes; the effects of tracking; the role of gender, class, and race in structuring educational opportunity; the effects of schooling on life course outcomes; the significance of a school's institutional environment; and the sociology of school reform movements.
Educational Leadership, 2012
Higher education researchers struggle with how to handle missing student ethnoracial data. Withou... more Higher education researchers struggle with how to handle missing student ethnoracial data. Without race data, they have trouble making comparisons across groups. However, dropping "race unknown" students from analyses potentially introduces bias into conclusions. There is little methodological discussion about how to proceed when faced with large numbers of missing student ethnoracial data. An important but so far unstudied question is: what are the characteristics of those college students that end up in the "race unknown" category? This research note examines how these students compare to others who do provide a racial identification to get a better sense of how counting or not counting these students may affect results. Additionally, using students' responses to two different questions about racial identification, we are able to examine differences within the proportion of students who might be counted as "race unknown." Our results suggest that Multiracial and White students make up significant percentages of "race unknown" college students in surveys. We also find that there are differences within the "race unknown" population. Every study of higher education will encounter student non-response on race and ethnicity, so this study is a useful one for researchers and policymakers alike.
Policy Futures in Education, 2021
Policy researchers have difficulty understanding stratification in enrollment in US higher educat... more Policy researchers have difficulty understanding stratification in enrollment in US higher education when race and ethnicity data are plagued by missing values. Students who decline to ethnoracially self-identify become part of a “race unknown” reporting category. In undergraduate enrollment, “race unknown” students are not randomly distributed and are highest among the most selective universities. In this “Policy Research Note,” we investigate these patterns at US law schools to understand if they are driven by selectivity. We find that the most competitive law schools, on average, report 8% of their students are race unknown, double the rate of other law schools. We argue that race unknown enrollment cannot be ignored when studying ethnoracial enrollments in higher education because it varies systematically by institutional type and may mask actual rates of ethnoracial diversity. We posit that the race unknown category is likely produced by a combination of individual and institut...
Research in Higher Education, 2021
Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student b... more Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student bodies; however, the higher education system is highly stratified. In this paper, we seek to understand stratification in the wake of the Great Recession by examining enrollment among students from differing income backgrounds by institutional type. Two theoretical frameworks suggest different conclusions. A Disaster Capitalism framework suggests that in places where the recession was most severe, enrollment by income would become more stratified than in places where the downturn was less severe. In contrast, Effectively Maintained Inequality would suggest that enrollments were already effectively stratified by income and would not necessarily be sensitive to exposure to an economic shock. Employing fixed effects modeling and novel data based on the tax records of 30 million Americans, we examine income composition by institutional type from 2004 to 2012. We find that although stratification by institutional type worsened during the recession and subsequent recovery, patterns of economic stratification were not more intense for institutions that enrolled students from states hardest hit by the recession. We conclude that these patterns are consistent with an Effectively Maintained Inequality framework. During the recession, the top quintiles continued to enjoy their longstanding disproportionate enrollment in the most selective institutions. For the bottom quintiles, the longstanding marginalization from 4-year college going persisted through the recession. These stratification patterns, however, were not more pronounced in places hardest hit by the recession.
The Journal of Higher Education, 2020
ABSTRACT Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic r... more ABSTRACT Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria—excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations—that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehensive approach to admissions may do little to ameliorate—and in some cases, may exacerbate—existing enrollment inequities. We also find that moving away from test scores and focusing on academic rigor represent potentially promising strategies for expanding access at some institutions.
Educational Researcher, 2020
Many postsecondary datasets collect gender data in ways that are not inclusive of all students. M... more Many postsecondary datasets collect gender data in ways that are not inclusive of all students. Many trans* students, those who identify as trans women, trans men, genderqueer, among other gender identities, are excluded when surveys collect gender data using only two categories. The American Bar Association recently became the first sector of higher education to collect and report enrollment data using three gender categories for all U.S. law schools. Between 2014 and 2019, there was a steady rise in the number of law schools that reported enrolling students in the “other” gender category. We interpret this growth to signify that law schools are beginning to collect data on students who were already there, not a reflection of exponential growth in trans* enrollment in law school. A more inclusive approach to gender data collection is necessary to better understand the educational trajectories of trans* students. However, data collection alone is not sufficient and may in fact be pr...
Higher Education, 2020
Universities in the USA must navigate a complex set of organizational goals when communicating ab... more Universities in the USA must navigate a complex set of organizational goals when communicating about international students. On one hand, international students signal that the university has a global reach and diverse student body; on the other hand, international students have been viewed as edging out domestic students for access to scarce resources. How do US universities frame and reframe the fraught narrative around international students? We examined the websites of over 160 large universities in the USA and collected screenshots of how international students were represented. Using an academic capitalism framing, we understand universities to be neoliberal actors focused on securing their status position and generating economic growth. In this way, our findings show how international students have come to be framed as consonant with multiple organizational missions and goals. These goals include being viewed as global/cosmopolitan, ethnically diverse and financially sound. International students are in this sense are discursively constructed through these representations, framed as markers of prestige and legitimacy, as well as a means of economic stimulus. We also find that they are rarely presented as ordinary or unremarkable participants in a campus community alongside their domestic counterparts, marked instead by these exceptional narratives that reframe them in ways that serve institutional goals.
Minerva, 2020
Over the course of the 20 th century, unprecedented growth in scientific discovery was fueled by ... more Over the course of the 20 th century, unprecedented growth in scientific discovery was fueled by broad growth in the number of university-based scientists. During this period the American undergraduate enrollment rate and number of universities with STEM graduate programs each doubled three times and the annual volume of new PhDs doubled six times. This generated the research capacity that allowed the United States to surpass early European-dominated science production and lead for the rest of the century. Here, we focus on origins in the organizational environment and institutional dynamics instead of conventional economic factors. We argue that three trends of such dynamics in the development of American higher education not often considered together—mass undergraduate education, decentralized founding of universities, and flexible mission charters for PhD training—form a process characterized by a term coined here: access symbiosis . Then using a 90-year data series on STEM PhD production and institutional development, we demonstrate the historical progression of these mutually beneficial trends. This access symbiosis in the U.S., and perhaps versions of it in other nations, is likely one critical component of the integration of higher education development with the growing global capacity for scientific discovery. These results are discussed in terms of the contributions of American universities to the Century of Science, recent international trends, and its future viability.
Educational Researcher, 2020
One ethnoracial reporting category perplexes higher education researchers: “race and ethnicity un... more One ethnoracial reporting category perplexes higher education researchers: “race and ethnicity unknown.” Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), we constructed a 28-year panel of 4,401 institutions. We find that the for-profit sector ranges from 5% to 18% “race unknown” students. In addition, almost 10% of students attending the most selective institutions were reported as “race unknown” in 2009 before dropping off precipitously. The size of the “race unknown” category can be attributed to some combination of student responses and data collection practices. We suggest researchers refrain from dropping “race unknown” from their studies as doing so may bias findings for the other ethnoracial categories, especially when comparing rates of student enrollment across institutional types.
The Journal of Higher Education, 2020
ABSTRACT Elite higher education institutions work hard to secure diverse classes, and students se... more ABSTRACT Elite higher education institutions work hard to secure diverse classes, and students seek out these institutions in part because they believe that diversity will enhance their own educational experiences. Institutional theories would predict that practices set by the elite institutions in the field would isomorphically trickle down, however, case studies of individual institutions indicate that higher education structures and cultures vary significantly across the spectrum of selectivity. Do all higher education institutions market their ethno-racial diversity to prospective students in the same ways as elite institutions? Are higher education institutions trying to send similar messages about their ethno-racial diversity or does this vary by selectivity level? This paper provides an examination of higher education at the organizational field level in order to answer questions that have previously been at the institutional level. Through analyzing the admissions webpages at 278 universities across the United States, we find that more selective institutions are more likely to represent their diversity, and more likely to engage in practices that emphasize their traditionally under-represented minority student populations than less selective institutions, though it is the less selective institutions that have higher populations of these students. We argue that variations in institutional habitus across selectivity help to explain these differences.
Industry and Higher Education, 2020
Policy discussions in the United States on the link between college majors and earnings have unde... more Policy discussions in the United States on the link between college majors and earnings have under-appreciated the role of cognitive skills. This study uses the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a unique data set that contains information on individual cognitive skills, college majors and earnings to investigate the relationships between them. The authors find that variation in numeracy and literacy skills is significantly associated with earnings for graduates of the same major. Also, there is an interactional effect between majors and cognitive skills to explain earnings. The findings shed light on the importance of considering cognitive skills when assessing the relationship between college majors and labour market outcomes.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2018
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2019
Race Ethnicity and Education, 2019
Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who id... more Since the time race has been an applied concept in the United States there have been those who identify with two or more racial categories. However, the 2000 Census was the first time individuals c...
Sociological Research Online, 2019
Most prior work on educational homogamy does not distinguish between college attendees who marry ... more Most prior work on educational homogamy does not distinguish between college attendees who marry someone who attended the same university (same-university marriages) and those who marry someone who attended a different university (different-university marriages). This article estimates the prevalence of partnering between individuals who attended the same university in the United States. Using rich data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this study finds that, among college graduates who marry other college graduates, about one third have same-university spouses. As higher education has massified and feminized, rates of same-university marriages have changed very little between 1973 and 2013. By distinguishing between same-university and different-university marriages, this article highlights the role that universities, as organizational settings, play in structuring elective affinities – Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the class-based shared experiences and tastes that form...
Educational Researcher, 2019
The federal government mandates that school personnel select race and ethnicity identifiers for s... more The federal government mandates that school personnel select race and ethnicity identifiers for students who do not provide that information. This process is called “observer identification,” and it poses a potential threat to the validity of self-identified race/ethnicity data because (a) evidence from other fields suggests that about 40% of the time, observer identification does not match self-identification of some of the fastest growing racial/ethnic groups in the K–12 population; (b) state and local guidelines for observer identification vary greatly; and (c) the Department of Education does not record how often observer identification is used, but there is good reason to suspect that the practice is widespread.
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2018
Universities are under pressure to represent the ethno-racial diversity of their student bodies i... more Universities are under pressure to represent the ethno-racial diversity of their student bodies in the most favorable light via their websites. We analyzed the race/ethnicity tables and figures featured prominently on the websites of 158 colleges and universities. We found three practices that institutions undertake to enhance the appearance of diversity on campus: omission, aggregation and addition of ethno-racial categories. Universities with the lowest levels of student diversity were the most likely to engage in these practices. We understand these practices to be organizational level racial projects (Omi and Winant, 2015; 1986). That is, universities are actively transforming “the content and importance of racial categories” (p. 61).
Educational Researcher, 2019
Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers... more Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers often are interested in understanding whether policies expand access for low-income students. In this brief, we highlight the limitations of a commonly available measure of low-income status—whether students receive a federal Pell grant—and compare it to new data on enrollment by income quintile to evaluate a recent policy effort within elite colleges aimed at expanding access. We demonstrate that Pell is a rough measure of low-income status and that without more detailed data on colleges’ economic diversity, policy evaluations focusing on existing Pell data will suffer from measurement error and potentially miss enrollment effects for moderate- and high-income students.