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In today’s edition: the segregation of American schools, 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.
⏳Read time: 5 minutes, 38 seconds
🚨 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:
Rick Clark, assistant vice provost and executive director of undergraduate admission at Georgia Tech and co-author of The Truth about College Admission
Brennan Barnard, director of college counseling at the Khan Lab School and co-author of The Truth about College Admission
Jodi Hester, college counselor at Woodward Academy in Georgia, will partner with me in moderating
👉 Register for free.
🗓️ Thursday, October 26 at2 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:
Andrew Maynard, professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University
Charles Isbell, provost, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lilach Mollick, director of pedagogy, Wharton Interactive
Benjamin Breen, associate professor of History at the University of California-Santa Cruz👉 Register for free. (Support from Coursera)
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.
Source: UCLA Civil Rights Project
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.
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 Test Prep. His quote was in response to my question about the rise in early-action applications.
Last year, Clemson received 26,000 applications for its first-ever early action cycle and then got an additional 32,000 regular decision applications for a freshman class that ended up having around 4,500 students.
Clemson deferred 15,000 of its 26,000 early applicants. It rejected only 300.
Universities care about yield. As Kuskowski told me, over time “we’re going to find differential yield rates for students in the applicant pool that is early action versus regular decision.” So that likely means if you want to go to Clemson and you’re out-of-state, you better apply early action to show you’re serious.
🗺️ 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)
