African Americans and College Choice: The Influence of Family and School (review)

Over the past 45 years, more than 1,900 publications have explored issues of college access and college choice. Nearly 20 years have passed since Hossler and Gallagher (1987) first offered their three-phase model of college choice. Now is a good time to pause and evaluate the model's efficacy. Kassie Freeman's African Americans and College Choice: The Influence of Family and School explores the conundrum of African American students and college choice: the high educational and career aspirations of African American students but their lower college enrollments compared to similarly abled peers. To do so she focuses on what Hossler and Gallagher call the "predisposition phase" of college enrollment—the time in which students decide to begin an active college search.

She argues that, for African American students, this predisposition phase is filtered by culture and offers a "model of predetermination" in its stead. Freeman arrives at this model through qualitative data gathered from a series of 16 focus groups, 70 students grades 10 through 12, in five metropolitan areas with large, economically diverse African American populations: Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. The schools attended were well represented and fairly balanced, including inner-city, magnet, private, and suburban schools.

A long list of work on Hossler and Gallagher's college choice model, mostly quantitative, attests to the model's reliability in explaining the college choice decision processes for dominant students: White, middle to high socioeconomic status, suburban, and male. Most researchers, however, acknowledge college choice variances on the basis of race and class, and a few highlight gender differences. A critical race theory (CRT) frame of reference may be helpful in understanding the variance. At its core, critical race theory contends that racialized norms are embedded in the practice, values, and discourse of North American life. Unarticulated standards of normalcy are, at their core, Anglo-centered and reflect racialized power distributions as reflected in economic, educational, and health disparities among others.

While Freeman does not directly reference CRT as her theoretical frame, she does engage in critical race work in this volume. She analyzes dominant discourse reflected in the Hossler and Gallagher model and recenters that discourse from a frame that provides a culturally relevant perspective for African Americans. In this vein, Freeman focuses on the "anomaly" of African American student college choice: the disconnect between high aspirations yet more limited college enrollments. Freeman contends that the Hossler and Gallagher model assumes that students universally operate from a perspective of rugged individualism—that academically able students are educationally engaged and will be self-prompted and predisposed to seek information about college.

Yet as Freeman illuminates, the communal orientation of African American culture renders the role of family, nuclear and extended, significant in the college choice decisions of African American students. When viewed in this cultural context, the aspirational and enrollment behaviors of African American students make sense. In short, the relationship between aspiration and enrollment for this group is at best limited. By not accounting for the cultural factor, researchers overestimate the influence of aspiration in African American student college choices. In addition to aspiration and ability as presented in the Hossler and Gallagher model, Freeman's "model of predetermination" includes a cultural support system between an extended family and the school. For Freeman, it is not the case that African American students are predisposed toward college but that environmental constraints are so heavy that cultural support is required for African American students to begin and complete the college search process. Rather, Freeman argues that it is the interaction of aspiration, ability, and support that predetermines who goes to college.

Freeman's contention regarding the role of culture is supported by research on the influence of social and cultural capital on college enrollment. This body...