Socioeconomic Status, Urbanism and Academic Performance in College

Abstract

DEANS, ADMISSION officers and counselors, in I their attempts to evaluate prospective students, have become greatly concerned with the factors that make for scholastic success in college. Attempts to construct valid predictive indexes have us ually concentrated on high school performance, various test scores, and personality factor s such as those which come to light during brief inte r v i e w s and in letters of recommendation from teachers, principals and alumnae. Social factors are rarely openly used in evaluating applicants for admission to college, not only because some of them are hard to measure, but also because most colleges wish to avoid any accusation that such things as social class, race, nativity or religion, are factors in their se lection procedures. Consequently, little is known about the relation ship of sociological variables to academic success even though sociological theory leads one to expect that such relationships exist. For instance, dif ferential socioeconomic status implies differential cultural opportunities and variation in the focus of interests of college students, and it seems reason able to believe that both cultural opportunity and in terests are factors in performance in the class room. Urbanism is another factor which is theo retically related to academic performance, because such educationally important factors as attitudes, and levels of aspiration, as well as cultural oppor tunities are different among urbanit?s than they are among rural people. l This paper is a report of an attempt to investi gate the relationships of socioeconomic status and urbanism to academic performance. Specifically, the hypothesis was that academic performance would be positively and significantly correlated with the socioeconomic status of families of college stu dents and with the degree of urbanism of the com munities in which they had grown up. Samples were drawn from two widely different college populations. One college is a state-sup ported institution located in a small city (population approximately 7, 000) in a r e latively sparsely set tied part of the Southwest. The other college is a privately endowed institution loe ated in a major Northeastern metropolis. The use of these two colleges was indicated by the des ire to avoid find ings which might be unique to a particular college or region, and also by the desire to have as wide a range as possible both in socioeconomic status and in urbanism. Each of the samples consisted of 100 randomly selected entering freshmen. All of the students were males. The research design called for the development of measures which would be applicable to each stu dent and which would quantify his academic per formance, the socioeconomic status of his family, and the degree of urbanism of each of the places he had lived in while growing up. If the me asures of socioeconomic status and urbanism were found to be positively correlated with the measure of academic success in each of the two samples, then the hypo thesis would be confirmed. The measure of academic performance in this study was the mean of the grade point averages earned by the student during his first two semesters in college. The grade point average is computed in such a manner that 4. 00 would indicate a straight A record, while 0. 00 would indicate a straight F record. The distributions of mean semester grade point averages for the two samples are sum marized in Table I. It is somewhat more difficult to arrive at a val id and accurate measure of the socioeconomic sta tuses of the students'families. This is the case because most studies of the factors comprising such status have been restricted to s ingle communities, and there is every reason to believe that what is true in one community may well not be true in an other. It seems particularly likely that the speci fics of the status structure of the Southwest are dif ferent from those in the Northeast. On the other hand, there is evidence that in both regions educa tion and occupation have a great deal to do with a family's social standing, and it seemed that a so cioeconomic status scale based on these two factors