Comparative Achievement of Graduates of Public and Catholic High Schools in their Freshman College Year

Abstract

THIS STUDY is a comparison of the achieve ment of 111 public high school graduates with that of 103 Catholic high school graduates se lected from the freshman class at the University of Kentucky during the school year 1961-62.2 The public school group was randomly selected from the same freshman class in subgroups of approximately the same size as that of the corre sponding Catholic school subgroup (Colleges of Agriculture, Arts and Sciences, Commerce, Edu cation, and Engineering). In addition students were classified on the basis of sex. The two groups were compared in all their subdivisions. Since the correlations of entrance examination scores and achievement were .42 for the Catho lic school graduates and .46 for the public school graduates, it seemed prudent to compare the two groups with respect to several nonintellectual var iables commonly regarded as bearing some rela tion to achievement. In this instance only the total of the public high school graduates was compared with the total of the Catholic high school gradu ates?there was no division into subgroups. The nonintellectual variables selected as the basis of comparison of the foregoing groups of graduates of public and Catholic high schools were the fol lowing: the Edwards Personal Preference Sched ule, extraclass activities, leadership, family educa tion, father's economic status, and age at entrance into college. The following freshmen were specifically ex cluded from the study: (1) those whose records offered insufficient data; (2) public school grad uates who had not spent all four years in a public high school; (3) Catholic school graduates who had not spent all four years in a Catholic high school; (4) freshmen who withdrew from college before the end of the academic year; (5) fresh men who were not entering the University of Ken tucky for the first time; and (6) those freshmen who attended neither a public nor a Catholic high school. Sixty-six hypotheses were tested: 60 were re lated to the comparison of achievement and six to the comparison with respect to nonintellectual variables. Method