High School Matters
Jeff Selingo
Bestselling author | Strategic advisor on future of learning and work | College admissions and early career expert | Contributor, The Atlantic | Angel investor | Editor, Next newsletter | Co-host, FutureU podcast
?? The segregation of American schools and college admissions, why you might want to apply early if you're applying from out-of-state to a big popular public (at least at Clemson), and the most popular undergrad campuses for those with doctorates. Here are excerpts from Next.?Sign up here.?
?? Events
I'll be holding the "Next Office Hour" twice more this month:
??? Monday, October 23 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT., we’ll continue exploring the latest trends in college admissions and how families can become better higher-education consumers during the search. Joining me will be:
??? Thursday, October 26 at?2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. we'll explore the the role AI plays in?gathering, organizing, and refining content for courses as well as personalizing classes for students. I'll be joined by:
A few weeks ago, I watched a powerful documentary on PBS called “The Busing Battleground.” It was about the effort in Boston to desegregate public schools by busing students to schools outside their neighborhoods. It was part of a two-part series that the network aired about how U.S. schools were slow to desegregate even after the 1954 landmark Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional.
Almost 70 years after that ruling, American schools remain heavily segregated. By some metrics, they are just as racially divided as they were in the late 1960s. This is important on many different levels but one critical one is the role high schools (and K-12 schools in general) play in college admissions.?
During my time inside admissions offices for my book, Who Gets In and Why, I quickly discovered that the unit being evaluated was less often the applicant than the applicant’s high school. Colleges, in essence, are recruiting and evaluating high schools, not students. So, the high schools where colleges recruit and why has a big impact on who eventually ends up on campuses. This becomes even more significant in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in June that struck down the use of race in college admissions.
Over the summer, I asked one of the Next interns, Olivia Roark , to take a deeper dive on the segregation of American high schools. Here is what she found:
As recently as 2021, more than a third of students attended public schools in which 75% or more of their peers were of a single race or ethnicity. More than 13,000 such schools—roughly 1 in 7 across the country—are located less than 10 miles from another racially isolated school that serves students of a different race, and more than half of those are less than five miles apart. Even when kids live right next to each other, their schools are segregated.?
Still more schools are segregated such that they are attended predominantly by a combination of Black and Hispanic children, the country’s two largest minority populations. Despite collectively representing less than 43% of the K-12 population, the average Black or Hispanic student’s school is roughly two-thirds Black and Hispanic.
In recent years, there has been a rise in intensely segregated schools in which student populations are more than 90% Black and Hispanic; at the majority of those schools, student populations are also more than 90% low-income.?
Overall, Black and Hispanic students are far more likely to be confined to schools with high concentrations of poverty: 37% of Black students and 38% of Hispanic students attend high-poverty schools compared to just 7% of white students. The general child poverty rates alone do not account for these disparities, as the poverty rate for white children is higher (8.5%) while the rates for Black (25.7%) and Hispanic (21.9%) children are significantly lower than their school poverty exposure rates.
In one analysis of recruitment patterns at 15 public universities, researchers found that college admissions representatives visit high schools that are significantly whiter and wealthier than the nearby schools they choose not to visit.
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Specifically, the average median household income of a visited school was $87,000, while that of a non-visited school was $62,000. On average, the student populations of schools that did not receive visits consisted of 23.8% more students of color compared to those that did. Both economic and racial disparities were particularly pronounced for out-of-state visits.?
With online recruitment, a similar pattern emerges in the way colleges purchase prospective student names from the College Board through the Student Search Service, which provides colleges with student lists based on demographics, student preferences, and standardized test scores. Even when colleges specifically search for underrepresented minority students with relatively high standardized test scores, the names they purchase tend to be for students who go to school in wealthier, whiter communities.?
In the long run, diversity in education must start with desegregation and more equitable resource allocation at the K-12 level. For now, colleges must get more creative with outreach to recruit students at a broader, more diverse set of high schools.? -Olivia Roark
Quotable
"Half of all the South Carolina residents we admit end up enrolling at the university. That same number for an out-of-state student is closer to 15%"?
—David Kuskowski, associate vice president for enrollment management, Clemson University
Background: Kuskowski was a guest of mine on a recent webinar I hosted for Huntington Learning Centers . His quote was in response to my question about the rise in early-action applications.
??? Watch a recording of the entire webinar here.
Supplements
??? India rising.?India has eclipsed China as the top source of international students in the United States, thanks in part to big increases in new students. "It’s the first time in 15 years China hasn’t held the No. 1 spot," Karin Fischer writes in her newsletter. (Latitudes)
?? What is the job of a community college? In the latest episode of Future U., I joined my co-host Michael Horn for a discussion in Sun Valley, Idaho about how community colleges are trying to do multiple jobs—transfer, job training, community development—but aren’t really optimized for any one job. (Future U)
?? Who hires job candidates without degrees? What university in the mid-Atlantic has sent more undergrads to get their PhD in chemistry over the last seven years? If you guessed the University of Pittsburgh you'd be right. Who sends more undergrads to doctorate degrees in electrical engineering? That would be the University of Illinois,Urbana-Champaign. These are just some of the tidbits you can find in Jon Boeckenstedt's latest post about about undergraduate institutions of doctoral recipients. (Higher Ed Data Stories)
Until next time, Cheers — Jeff??
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Database Associate at a Cincinnati Nonprofit
1 年(Part 4) Going back to school segregation. I can use Cincinnati as a specific example: about 40-50% of the city is black, and about 2/3 to 3/4 of the school district is black. It is because the white people who either didn't leave Cincinnati during desegregation, or moved back to Cincinnati to gentrify black neighborhoods, don't send their children to Cincinnati Public Schools, with the exception of a few elementary schools in white neighborhoods and a couple of magnet high schools in addition to the school I graduated from. The concentration of poverty is because usually if a black person has enough money to move out of the inner city, he does, myself included. The school level poverty compared to the neighborhood poverty is the way it is because anyone who can afford to send their children to private school usually does so. The reason why it's inverted for white people is because there is not as much concentrated poverty among white people (meaning that poor whites are not surrounded by other poor whites the way that poor black people are).
Database Associate at a Cincinnati Nonprofit
1 年(Part 3) In order for me to be at a school where everyone was smart, I had to test into the one high school in the city where white students still go to school. Walnut Hills High School is known throughout the country for the fact that almost all of us who go there end up in college, in some cases the top colleges in the country and the world. We are told starting in 10th or 11th grade how to start going about looking for colleges, I remember college fairs being held right in the lunchroom of my high school (as opposed to other college fairs that were for everybody that were at more public places). University of Cincinnati and The Ohio State University left applications at the school for anyone who wanted to apply, and everyone who applied to these two schools got in (as an aside, this was before I learned that at most state universities, you don't actually have to be smart to get in). I didn't know until reading this article that universities purposefully avoid recruiting at black high schools. I don't know how this affects the number of people from those high schools who end up going to college. (cont.)
Database Associate at a Cincinnati Nonprofit
1 年(Part 2) I came to the conclusion that if the "equal" in "Separate but Equal" had been made more equal, in terms of money spent on schools, black students would have had a net gain by not going to school with white children. The reason why schools are still segregate is because we still put kids in school based on what neighborhood they live in, and except for gentrifying neighborhoods, you don't see black and white people living side by side. Of course the white residents of those gentrifying neighborhoods don't send their children to the neighborhood schools, unless and until there are no black kids going there. The Milliken V. Bradley decision made it so that suburbs don't have to desegregate their schools, and that's another reason schools are still segregated. When I was a child I used to wonder why I was in a school and a community where almost everyone else was black, and why other than myself, the few white kids who were there were the only other ones who got good grades. There is a good book by Jawanza Kunjufu called "To be Popular or Smart: The Black Peer Group," as well as another of his books, "Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys," that answers that question. (cont.)
Database Associate at a Cincinnati Nonprofit
1 年(Part 1) Jeff Selingo there are a lot of different directions I can take this. I probably need to make my own column, or write a book, to come at it from every angle I'd like. I can come at this both from my experience as a student and my studies in college, which were mostly based on trying to learn why things I experienced as a student happened the way they did. I don't think I saw the specific documentary you did about busing in Boston, but I have heard about it and about how racist the white people were to the black students. As I got older, I learned why school desegregation wasn't the best idea. The main reason is that a lot of black teachers and administrators got fired because they weren't going to let black teachers teach white children, or black principals run schools with white students and white teachers. The other problem is one I remember from my own experience and that is not learning accurate black history in the white-run high school I went to. I went to an all-black elementary school, and I learned about black historical figures I wouldn't have otherwise learned about until after I became an adult, and I also learned "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," which I wouldn't have learned until after I was an adult. (cont.)
Executive Director of Enrollment Management at Shorelight
1 年Really excellent article. I believe the cycle of admissions offices selecting from select high schools is further perpetuated by students and counselors and others within the school network that don’t believe they have a chance at certain HEIs and therefore don’t bother to apply. I think of my rural high school in Michigan as an example where the counselors believed they had a shot at sending students to Michigan State but Michigan was not even on their list of potential achools students should consider. I think this context helps frame how that cycle is perpetuated in the beliefs and action of those within the high school system as well.