Minority Post‐secondary Education Attendance, High School Desegregation, and Student Characteristics[1

Abstract

ABSTRACT With a critical review of the literature on long‐term effects of school desegregation in the USA, the authors hypothesized that desegregation would not uniformly affect post‐secondary outcomes among minority students. As an institutional condition, however, desegregation could change the outcomes’ relations with student background and experience. Instead of asking whether desegregation had an impact net of individual background effects, the authors focused on how individual effects on post‐secondary success were influenced by school desegregation. Drawing longitudinal data from the High School and Beyond (HS&B) and using a two‐level hierarchical logistic regression technique, the authors studied minority students' post‐secondary outcomes, including: attending any post‐secondary schools, attending 4‐year college, and completing college 4 years after high school, with the following predictors: (1) at student level, minority student socio‐economic status, immigration background, curriculum placement, and the length of desegregation experience; and (2) at the school level, high school desegregation, academic program enrollment rates, and average socio‐economic status. It was found that minority students from desegregated high schools had slightly lower post‐secondary education attendance than their peers from segregated schools. Further, the effect of inferior curricula on attendance was worse in desegregated schools than in predominantly minority schools. Desegregation did not appear to change post‐secondary attendance's relations with student background (socio‐economic status and immigration status). The results suggested that a quality curriculum was crucial for improving minorities’ post‐secondary attendance, whereas racial composition in high school was not as important as many assumed. Schools with high rates of academic program enrollment had a higher average of minorities' chances for post‐secondary education. In such schools, the positive effect of minority children's long experience in a desegregated setting was stronger than in schools with low academic program enrollment. But ironically, high academic enrollment also intensified the negative effect on the chances among the minority students who were placed in inferior curricular programs. [1] This research was supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association which receives funds for its ‘AERA Grants Program’ from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Education Statistics (US Department of Education) under NSF Grant #RED‐9452861. Opinions reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies. Please direct correspondence to Gary G. Huang, PhD., Senior Research Analyst, Synectics for Management Decisions, Inc., 3030 Clarendon Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on our work.