Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. That progress has slowed since the 1980s, and the United States now lags behind several other industrialized nations in the proportion of young people entering higher education. See Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (2001). 2. See William G. Bowen and Derek Bok (1998). See also Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin (2005) for analyses of equity issues in access to college. 3. In their book, The Shape of the River, Bowen and Bok (1998) estimated that about 20 percent of U.S. universities are selective, in the sense of having many applicants competing for each opening. The bulk of universities and colleges admit all applicants who meet basic entrance requirements. 4. Douglas Massey et al.’s study (1993) of minority freshmen at Ivy League and other selective colleges, The Source of the River, found that many black freshmen in those colleges are relatively well off in terms of socioeconomic origins. The large majority of minority college students in the United States attends less selective institutions and comes from considerably less advantaged family backgrounds. 5. More details on each of the data sets and our analytical methods are provided in each of the following chapters and in the appendix A of this book. 6. William J. Bennett (1990), The De-Valuing of America. 7. Susan P. Choy (2002) defines the “traditional undergraduate” as “one who earns a high school diploma, enrolls full time immediately after finishing high school, depends on parents for financial support, and either does not work during the school year or works part time.” Only 27 percent of today’s undergraduates are traditional by this definition, and those who take a classical liberal arts curriculum at a residential college constitute an even smaller subset. Chapter 2 1. During the 1950s and 1960s going to college became more and more popular in New York City, but the number of places at CUNY remained constant in the face of a great increase in the number of applications for admission. This produced heightened competition for places even in the system’s community colleges. 225 2. Variants of CUNY’s use of high school rank to determine admission have spread in the last few years to other state university systems such as Texas and California. In the wake of court cases and legislative actions against race-based affirmative action, university systems have instead adopted a policy of admitting those in the top ranks of every high school class. A class ranking cut-off applies equally to all applicants, but it disproportionately benefits minority applicants wherever schools are highly segregated. 3. In addition, CUNY stipulated that transfer to a B.A. program with full credit was to be guaranteed for all community college graduates. 4. For a more-detailed description of the processes leading up to the openadmissions policy, see David E. Lavin, Richard D. Alba, and Richard A. Silberstein (1981) and Lavin and David Hyllegard (1996). 5. Part of the reason CUNY’s program was perceived as unique is that it came on the heels of a decade or so in which admissions to four-year colleges in the system were very competitive, requiring in some years high school averages of near 90 for entry to some schools. 6. Details of the survey samples and statistical methods are provided in appendix A. 7. See the variable “Mean College Preparatory Credits” in table 2.1. Students were expected to accumulate four college-preparatory credits per year from the freshman through senior years of high school. Therefore, a difference of four credits would be the equivalent of one year, and two credits would represent a half year. 8. In the last year before open admissions, 1969, 75 percent of all minority entrants (combining blacks and Hispanics into one “minority” category) were placed in community colleges, compared with 40 percent of all whites. So ethnic inequality in initial positioning, while substantial, was narrower after open admissions than before. Also, while minority enrollments in the CUNY system grew dramatically under open access, their presence in senior colleges leapt upward even more startlingly, almost sevenfold between 1969 and the early 1970s. The proportional increase of minority enrollments in community colleges was smaller: around a fourfold increase in these schools. For whites the comparable figures are much less dramatic: their post-open-admissions enrollment increase less than doubled in both four-year and community colleges. In short, even in the face of considerable inequality across the two tiers of CUNY, minority enrollment in...