Title: Unequal Playing Fields, Same Game
Description: The "college-for-all" norm encourages all students to attend college, and while rising college ambitions point to the effectiveness of this encouragement, differences by race and income in who goes to the most selective institutions and who actually graduates from those institutions point to persistent inequalities. With few exceptions, the majority of research on college access has focused more on documenting these inequalities and less on explaining how students end up in their respective institutions. In particular, we lack in-depth examinations of how students navigate the college admissions process, which represents one of the last hurdles between students and college attendance. Considering the increasingly complex nature of college admissions, especially for the most elite schools, the application process is a key gate-keeping mechanism in the reproduction of inequality in higher education, both in terms of who attends college and whether or not they finish (vertical stratification) and what kind of school they enroll in (horizontal stratification).