Choice and inequality in US higher education
Keywords: Education.

My dissertation "Choice and Inequality in Higher Education" describes the way seemingly benign choices predict course and campus experiences and can perpetuate inequality. I draw on literatures of capital, habitus, identity development, and gender status beliefs and contribute to literature on stratification and sociology of education. I co-designed a longitudinal study of approximately 85 students matriculating in Fall 2019 at an elite west coast university, which I call Western University. The sample generally matches the demographics of the university. I interview these students quarterly to observe how their academic plans, choices, and experiences accumulate over time. In each interview, students discuss each of the courses they considered, their motivations for their ultimate selection, and their experiences and feelings about current and prior courses. My dissertation research uses only the first four panels of interviews (Sum '19, Fall '19, Win '20, and Spr '20). I also have access to 20 years of university transcript and enrollment data, allowing me to compare trends in our sample to the undergraduate population. In the work presented here, my aim was to understand the relationship between university structural/cultural factors and student factors/agency, and how both factors informed the choices students made in their first year. I analyzed three specific instances of students' decision-making in the university context. The first paper, "'Should I start at Math 101?' Content Repetition as an Academic Strategy in Elective Curriculums, " a collaboration with Mitchell Stevens and Philip Hernandez, explores how undergraduates make their first course decisions in mathematics. Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 of the 85 students in our study, we show that incoming students with disparate pre-college experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies when considering first college math courses. Specifically, we found that content repeaters, those who opted for courses that repeated material covered in prior coursework, received high grades and reported confidence in their math ability. In contrast, novices, those who opted for courses covering material new to them, and who were in the same classes as content repeaters, received lower grades and reported invidious comparisons with classmates. Strategies vary with students' socioeconomic background and prior exposure to institutions of higher education, suggesting that content repetition plays a role in maintaining class disparities in STEM pathways. Our findings encourage researchers to resist equating content repetition with remediation, to attend to the agentic and social-psychological dimensions of academic progress, and recognize that elective curriculums create conditions for the performative reproduction of academic and socioeconomic inequalities. The second paper, "Offering Safe Passage: Grading Schemes and Enrollment Patterns in Undergraduate Math, " further considers student choice of a first math course. This study takes advantage of a natural experiment that occurred in the wake of Covid-19, when Western switched to all online instruction and mandated pass/fail grading during the Spring 2020 academic term. Using five years of transcript data collected prior to the move to pass/fail grading and comparing it to the 2019 - 2020 cohort, I find a significant spike in women's enrollment in a first math course during spring 2020. This uptick in women's math enrollments resulted in more women enrolled in introductory math courses at Western in 2019-2020 than in any of the three previous years. I supplement the transcript data with the interviews from the longitudinal cohort study to investigate this phenomenon. The women in this study who enrolled in their first college math course in Spring 2020 described the pass/fail option as giving them "permission" to attempt courses that otherwise intimidated them. Self-declared race data was available for the 85 students and shows that the racial/ethnic groups least represented in math (Black, Latinx, Native/Indigenous) were the most likely to take their first math class in the pass/fail environment. This study contributes to the literature on under-represented women's relationships with math and demonstrates that their doubt in their ability to excel contributes to their avoidance of introductory math courses. It moreover suggests that a policy shift to pass/fail for introductory math courses has the potential to encourage more women and under-represented groups to enroll in first math courses, and enroll sooner, keeping the door to studying STEM open in these students' first year of studies while providing a prerequisite necessary for forward progress on their degree plans. The third paper, "A Little Extra: Extracurricular Participation Demographic Differences in Elite Education, " explores the patterns in extracurricular involvement for first-year students at Western University. Extracurricular activities are ubiquitous in elite undergraduate education in the US, yet the ideal extent and range of participation is only rarely specified. Extracurricular offerings are a product of university funding, endorsements, and benefit from the culture of joining (e.g., hosting club day during orientation week, providing space for cultural centers and club theater productions). Extracurricular organizations serve multiple important functions for the university and the individual student. They are places of community building/friendship, professional networking, skill-building, income generation, and/or identity exploration/confirmation. Drawing on interviews from the longitudinal cohort study, I quantify participation in formalized extracurricular activities and describe demographic variation in participation across organizational types. I find that women from under-represented racial/ethnic backgrounds are involved in more extracurricular organizations and have more participation-quarters than other demographic groups. They participate in almost every type of extracurricular organization at higher rates, with the exception of academic organizations, research, and paid work. They are especially active in pre-professional and race/ethnicity organizations. This work is descriptive and does not yet extrapolate the implications of the disparity in participation.