Abstract
Bolstering low-income students’ postsecondary participation is important to remediate these students’ disadvantages and to improve society’s overall level of education. Recent research has demonstrated that secondary schools vary considerably in their tendencies to send students to postsecondary education, but existing research has not systematically identified the school characteristics that explain this variation. Identifying these characteristics can help improve low-income students’ postsecondary outcomes. We identify relevant characteristics using population-level data from Wisconsin, a mid-size state in the United States. We first show that Wisconsin’s income-based disparities in postsecondary participation are wide, even net of academic achievement. Next, we show that several geographic characteristics of schools help explain between-secondary school variation in low-income students’ postsecondary outcomes. Finally, we test whether a dense set of school organisational features explain any remaining variation. We find that these features explain virtually no variation in secondary schools’ tendencies to send low-income students to postsecondary education.
Highlights
In the U.S at large, low-income youth are far less likely to participate in postsecondary education than their more economically advantaged counterparts
Economic disparities in postsecondary education Before analysing variation in school effects, we begin by describing economic disparities in postsecondary outcomes in Wisconsin
School organisational features When we turn to school features that we consider more manipulable, such as personnel ratios or course offerings, we find little evidence that these factors contribute to variation in the chances that low-income students attending different high schools go on to attend baccalaureate colleges
Summary
In the U.S at large, low-income youth are far less likely to participate in postsecondary education than their more economically advantaged counterparts. A low-income individual is less likely to attend postsecondary education (college in the U.S.), especially a baccalaureate college, than even economically advantaged individuals with the same level of academic achievement (Belley & Lochner, 2007). At minimum, this disparity is important because baccalaureate college attendance is associated with a hefty wage premium. Postsecondary participation confers other private benefits such as health (Cutler & Lleras-Muney, 2006) and job satisfaction (Baum et al, 2013), further suggesting that baccalaureate college attendance disparities help stratify desired outcomes based on one’s socioeconomic origins. Given that increases in statewide educational attainment bring public rewards like increased tax revenue and civic involvement (Baum et al, 2013), all of society stands to benefit when more low-income youth participate in postsecondary education
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