(Illustration by iStock/SvetaZi)
As the cost of a college degree in the United States continues to climb, debates about the cost and payoff of a college education intensify. Much of the media coverage that asks whether higher education is really an engine of social mobility seldom examines differences between four-year colleges, community colleges, and for-profit colleges, however. Do all institutions open their doors to all students in the same ways?
In a new paper, Michelle Jackson, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University, and Christof Brandtner, an associate professor of innovation at EM Lyon Business School in Lyon, France, investigate the cultural signals that colleges send to prospective students through their communications. Their findings show how colleges have subtle ways of welcoming certain groups of applicants while deterring others.
Specifically, the researchers demonstrate that discrimination begins with the preapplication process as students weigh which colleges match their own desires and expectations. A form of “institutional exclusion” occurs, the authors claim, when prospective students conclude that a college is a poor match for them, based on the college’s promotional materials and the cultural signals they send. Beyond the usual suspects of educational inequality that many researchers have identified—the financial burden, academic preparedness, and information deficits—cultural narratives about the college that appear online reinforce boundaries between groups.
“Many studies of culture focus on single organizations, but we wanted to say something broader about the whole college infrastructure,” Jackson says. “We came up with something of a mixed design, looking at different regions of the country and different types of colleges to build a sample that could speak to the country as a whole.”
Like other organizations, colleges craft narratives as part of their public profile, describing the cultural environment at their institution to attract applicants. Seeking to understand these institutional narratives and discern differences between them, the researchers used computational text analysis to mine mission statements and financial aid webpages. Such materials are designed to help students decide which college is the right match for their ambitions.
Through word analysis and topic modeling, several words and themes emerged, highlighting critical differences in signals that colleges send to students, with consequences for enrollment behavior. While for-profit colleges invoked career, business, and employment aspirations, the same language was not salient at four-year colleges, where postmaterialist themes such as diversity and citizenship in the world were prominent.
To test how individuals responded to these terms—determining whether and how focal words such as career and creative discovery operate as cultural signals—the researchers administered an experiment to high school students, half of whom came from privileged backgrounds and the other half from underprivileged circumstances. The researchers presented students with college profiles to measure the effects of different words. The results were clear: Narratives about career success appealed to participants from less privileged backgrounds, while wealthier students favored colleges with profiles that emphasized creative discovery and exploring the world.
In designing the survey, the researchers found a way to take financial considerations out of the equation. “We wanted to get respondents into a mode where they weren’t thinking about the constraints of cost,” Jackson says. “So we included an experimental term and had three groups. One explained that the cost of college would be entirely covered by grants. For another group, we said that students would receive help obtaining loans. The third informed students that they would automatically be considered for merit scholarships.”
With financial constraints largely out of the picture, the researchers could compare the size of the effect of language differences. They saw that for-profit colleges effectively appealed to students who prioritized career training and financial returns. At the other end of the spectrum, wealthier students frowned on colleges that presented career-focused narratives.
In 2015, the Obama administration’s Department of Education launched the College Scorecard, including data about how much money graduates from a given school earn on average. The administration’s assumption was that making the costs and returns of a college education transparent would mitigate inequality in college enrollment. Jackson and Brandtner’s study suggests, however, that cultural forms of inequality shape the pre-enrollment process.
Many colleges now expend great resources and energy helping students feel comfortable and included. Administrators routinely consider how students from different class backgrounds may or may not feel at home at college, developing programs for first-generation and low-income college students, for example, to meet a variety of needs. But institutions can do more to address the concerns of potential applicants from all backgrounds.
“Increasing the types of people who come to college means helping them feel that they will fit in,” Jackson says. “We need to listen to what everyone is looking for when they come to college.”
Find the full study: “Institutional Exclusion: The Cultural Production of Educational Inequality Through College Narratives” by Michelle Jackson and Christof Brandtner, Social Forces, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.