High School Quality and Race Differences in College Achievement

Abstract

This paper uses 10 years of enrollment data at three Texas public universities to examine whether, to what extent, and in what ways racial and ethnic differences in college achievement can be traced to high school attended. To identify school attributes responsible for unequal college readiness, we estimate fixed effects models for three high school strata defined by their socioeconomic composition. We find that high school affluence does not insulate minority students from achievement disparities vis-à-vis their same school classmates beyond the first semester. Furthermore, high school influences on academic achievement carry over through the college career at least through 4-year graduation, but only at institutions with selective admissions.

Lies, Discrimination, and Internalized Racism: Findings from the Lab

“…There is a widely publicized performance gap between Blacks and Whites on mental and academic tasks in American society. This has been noted in terms of SAT scores (Card andRothstein 2007, Fleming 2002), high school (Fletcher and Tienda 2015), and post-secondary performance (Men n.d.). In all of these cases, Blacks tend to perform worse than Whites.…”

Can You Leave High School Behind?

“…However, after controlling for high school fixed effects, they note that the racial gap disappeared and, at some institutions, minority students actually achieved higher average first semester grade point averages than white students from the same high schools. In a subsequent paper, Fletcher & Tienda (2012) used a similar methodology to examine whether racial gaps in college achievement varied with the economic disadvantage of sending high schools, measured as the share of students who ever received a school lunch subsidy. Their findings suggest that racial achievement gaps for minority students relative to white students from the same high schools did not exist in first semester grade point averages, but appeared between the first and sixth semesters of college for all strata of high school economic advantage.…”