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1979 - School Racial Composition and College Attendance Revisited

Attribution: Eckland, Bruce
Researchers: Bruce Eckland
University Affiliation: UNC
Email:
Research Question:
Direct effects of school racial composition on college attendance when introducing curriculum and grades and relocating the test scores.
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Sociology of Education
Journal Entry: Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 122-125
Year: 1979
Findings:
  • 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.
Keywords: Ability GroupsCollegeCurriculumLong Term OutcomesRacial CompositionMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: Secondary Survey DataAnalysis Methods: Regression Sampling Frame:High School graduating seniors
Sampling Types: NonrandomAnalysis Units: StudentData Types: Quantitative-Longitudinal
Data Description:
  • Their purpose is to test Crain & Mahard’s 1978 conclusion that effects of high school desegregation for Blacks on school achievement and college attendance were negative in the South and positive in the North.
  • 503 individual Blacks in the North and 1,034 in the South in the National Longitudinal Survey.
  • Difference in methodology than Crain & Mahard: treats test scores as exogenous so it allows to assess the direct impact of school desegregation on college attendance apart from test performance.
  • In this model the percentage of White, the socioeconomic status of parents, and test scores are treated as correlated exogenous variables.
  • DV: College attendance
  • IV: Socioeconomic status, ability (uses test scores for reading, vocabulary, and mathematics), college attendance, percentage White, college preparatory curriculum, high school grades, enrollment in traditionally Black college, college selectivity.
Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:
Archives: K-12 Integration, Desegregation, and Segregation Abstracts
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