School Racial Composition and College Attendance Revisited

  • No direct effect of school desegregation on Black college attendance in either North or South.
  • There is NO evidence, controlling for ability test scores, that desegregation has positive effects on college attendance in the North (or South).
  • In both North and South , the strongest determinant of attendance at a more selective institution is measured ability. Racial composition of the high school attended had no significant effect in either the North or South.
  • The positive association they found between school desegregation and the 12th grade test performance and college outcomes of Blacks in the North is spurious, due to the common dependency of these variables on the characteristics of the kinds of students’ who end up in desegregated high schools.