A new study examines the role of high schools in explaining students’ initial placement into college and into a college major. In other words, does where you attended high school have much to do with where you go to college and the quality of the major that you pursue?
Analysts study outcomes from six cohorts of full time, non-transfer students who entered a four-year public university in Missouri as college freshmen straight from a public high school between 1996 and 2001 (the sum of which totaled roughly 58,000 students). Students are tracked for eight years to determine graduation outcomes.
They treat majors as specific to each university such that students at different universities who have the same major (i.e., it has the same classification code from the U.S. Department of Education) don’t get clumped together; this way, they can devise a measure of academic quality for each university major that is based on the academic qualifications of students who complete a degree. In other words, the quality of majors by each university is based on the pre-college academic qualifications (namely class percentile ranks and ACT scores) of the students who completed a degree in that major at that university. So if you have two universities that differ in terms of their overall average selectivity, analysts are able to determine if majors at less selective universities are of higher “quality” than some majors at more selective universities. (Note too, that this is not about measuring growth in high school. They use a measure of high school disadvantage which is the share of students on free and reduced-price lunch and the share of individuals age twenty-five-plus with less than a bachelor’s degree in the high school’s zip code.)
Like previous research, they find that students from lower socioeconomic high schools systematically enroll at lower-quality universities relative to their similarly qualified peers who attended more affluent high schools. Yet high schools have little sway over the quality of college major placements within universities. In other words, students don’t sort into higher or lower quality majors as a result of the high school they attended.
They also find that there is within-university variation in the quality of majors, such that most math and science majors are higher quality and many social science, general education, and fine arts majors are lower quality.
Finally, the quality of the initial major (what students initially declared) strongly predicts the quality of the final major at those same universities. So, for example, kids don’t start in a major comprised of students with lower academic qualifications and switch to one comprised of students with vastly higher academic qualifications.
In short, high schools matter more when it comes to where students will enroll for college, not what they will study.
SOURCE: Rajeev Daroli and Cory Koedel, “How high schools explain students' initial colleges and majors,” CALDER (January 2017).
