E-Mail as Social Capital and its Impact on First-Year Persistence of 4-Year College Students

Abstract

This study addressed the influence of social capital factors on the first-year persistence of beginning first- and second-generation four-year college students. First-generation students were those students whose parents had never attended college. Second-generation students had at least one parent who attended college. A case was made for considering e-mail to be a form of social capital. Data for the study were from the NCES Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) 1996/1998 survey. Findings from the cross-tabulations indicated that first-generation students differed from second-generation students over a range of demographic, socioeconomic, high school, social capital, academic and social integration, and college performance factors. Findings from the sequential logistic regressions indicated that first-generation status, after controlling for all other factors in the study, had a statistically significant, but comparatively minor, negative effect on persistence. Findings indicated that whether a student had an e-mail account was a statistically significant predictor of persistence.