Literary Review #4: Accounting for Socioeconomic Differences in Delaying the Transition to College

 

Citation:

Goldrick-Rab, Sara, and Seong Won Han. “Accounting for Socioeconomic Differences in Delaying the Transition to College.” Review of Higher Education, vol. 34, no. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, pp. 423–45, doi:10.1353/rhe.2011.0013.

Summary:

 As its title would suggest, this research paper attempts to use logistical models to identify the different factors that determine why students delay transitioning from high school to college. The study utilizes data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, conducted between 1988 and 2000. Their analysis found the most significant factor was in differences in socioeconomic status, with students from low socioeconomic families were much more likely to delay transitioning and would delay for a much longer period of time. This is an important field of research to study because students who delay their initial enrollment are much less likely to finish with a bachelor's degree within 8 years, and policy-makers want to be able to find the most effective changes to combat this issue.

The study also found that students who took more math and science classes in high school were less likely to delay going to college, since they were more likely to qualify for merit scholarships. Additionally, because advanced science and math courses are more optional than other courses of study in high school, it can be an indicator of which students are more achievement-oriented in their goals. Students who had children or started a family in high school were also more likely to delay going to college, but students from more affluent families often delayed for a much shorter period of time.

Authors:

 Sara Goldrick-Rab is a professor of sociology at Temple University, and also the Chief Strategy Officer for Emergency Aid for Edquity, a student financial aid company. She is an advocate for increasing college accessibility for students of lower-income family, and has sparked movements to shed light on the food and housing insecurity issues some students face.

Co-author Seong Won Han is an associate professor whose research focuses mainly on the issues of educational access and equity, on both a domestic and international scale. According to her professional summary, she uses "large-scale international and national data" in order to tackle her research questions.

Key Terms:

 Family formation is an important factor in determining if students delay going to college, and is the sole factor of how long the period of delay is, according to the research findings. As stated before, students of lower socio economic status are more likely to get married or start families in high school, and often delay going to college for much longer compared to higher-SES students, if they even go to college at all.

Another important factor the research paper talks about is educational expectations, which is a measure of how much a student's family expects their child to earn a bachelor's degree. Naturally, students of higher SES are more likely to have parents with higher expectations, and are more likely to attend private high schools and achieve higher test scores. In contrast, students of parents with lower educational expectations are more likely to score lower on tests and marry/have children before entering college.

Quotes:

 "'Gappers' are nearly six times more likely to come from families in the bottom 20% of the socioeconomic distribution, as compared to those in the top 20%...Furthermore, the length of the gap also varies, with low-SES students taking, on average, an extra 13 months to enter college, and high-SES students delaying for a far shorter period of only 4.5 months." (p. 424)

"...the timing of the transition from high  school  to  college  is  an  important  contributor  to  whether  a  student completes a degree... 9% of college-goers who delay their initial enrollment complete a bachelor’s degree within eight years of high school graduation in contrast to 55% of those who do not delay" (p. 424)

"As noted earlier, the popular press frequently writes about students who take a gap year and the many programs arising to serve them. It is troubling that so many of those articles neglect the significant socioeconomic differences in who experiences the gap year and in what ways. It is quite possible that socioeconomically advantaged students are accruing additional advantages during their time off, while socioeconomically challenged students are experiencing a delay for less positive reasons." (p. 441)

Value:

Examining the determiners of why students take a gap year is incredibly important for my research paper, as it pertains to my assess of the efficacy of taking a gap year. The findings of this paper are actually somewhat surprising, since most people assume that gap years are an activity mostly exclusive to more affluent students, when in actuality students from less affluent families are usually the ones taking time off between high school and college. The key difference is of course that these students are often not seeking out the typical experiences that come with a traditional gap year.

The last quote in the previous section is a concept I have previously not heard of before, as I always interpreted programs to help fund gap year opportunities as a tool to help socioeconomically-disadvantaged students. It makes sense, since low-SES students are often more pressured to seek work that they can get paid for during their time off of school, whereas the usefulness of a traditional gap year is less material.