Colleges’ Climate for Low-Income Students Shapes Academic Confidence

Some colleges put significant resources into recruiting and financially supporting low-income students. But how colleges describe those programs also matters, according to a new paper. If messages from a college suggest that it is “warm” toward students like them, the authors found, low-income students’ academic confidence and identification as high achievers are stronger than if the messages suggest that it is “chilly” — that the needs of students like them are ignored or overlooked. We talked with the paper’s lead author, Alexander S. Browman, about the research and what colleges can learn from it. The conversation with Mr. Browman, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northwestern University, has been edited and condensed.

Q. What got you interested in exploring whether low-income students’ academic confidence or expectations could be influenced by the ways such students saw their colleges as friendly or unfriendly toward them?

A. We’ve been noticing in the literature and in the press a pretty big uptick in the acknowledgment of the type of difficulties that students from these low socioeconomic status, or low SES, backgrounds have when they try to reach and finance university education. A lot of universities have been making these very concerted efforts to try to increase the amount of financial aid they’ve got, the amount of work-study opportunity they have. And they’ve been publicizing this to try to increase the admission of students like that. But still, in the literature, students who are admitted continue to express this feeling that their universities are less focused on serving students who are from backgrounds like theirs.

But there wasn’t really any literature that had examined whether the experiences these students were having had any important psychological consequences. So our goal was really to see whether presenting the university as being explicitly committed to, versus passively more ignoring of, socioeconomic diversity could influence these low-SES students’ academic motivation, identification as being strong students, and sense of connectedness to academic success.

Q. Could you give an overview of your experiments?

A. We had three experiments. All of them used the same materials. We brought in students from basically across the income spectrum, and we randomly assigned them to either read some statements more explicitly focused on supporting students from low-SES backgrounds — so it talked about financial aid, it talked about the availability of work-study — whereas another group of students saw statements that downplayed the school’s commitment to those types of students and really focused more on the fact that there were less students at the school who required financial aid.

Then depending on which study, we measured either their sense of academic confidence, how strongly they felt that they could do well at the school they were at; their sense of their academic expectations, what grades they thought that they were going to get; or we used a reaction-time measure that’s been used a lot in the psychological literature to examine how strongly they tied their own personal identity to high academic achievement.

Q. Could you give some concrete examples of the kind of statements that you used to convey either warmth or chilliness?

A. When we tried to convey a sense of chilliness, we used statements like “the cost of attendance for this academic year was X amount,” which is around $60,000, “which over half of the families at this school manage without any financial aid.” And when we were trying to present it as a more warm environment, we had statements like “dedicated to assisting students in earning money to meet their educational costs, the school is strongly involved with the federal work-study program and will pay over $2.8 million to its work-study students this year.”

Q. And what did you find?

A. For the low-SES students, when we exposed them to information that was suggestive of their university’s commitment to supporting socioeconomic diversity versus when they were exposed to more explicit statements that kind of downplayed the university’s commitment to financial aid, we found that they had greater confidence in pursuing academic tasks, they had higher expectations for academic success, and they had a stronger sense of themselves as being higher achievers.

Q. Given what you found from this research, what advice do you have for colleges that want to be seen as welcoming by low-income students?

A. I have to preface this answer by saying we can really only speak to institutions that already have the resources available to provide for these students because that’s the type of institution that we studied in this work.

While providing these financial resources is unquestionably important for addressing financial disadvantages, and it’s great that there are schools that take the issue of increasing socioeconomic diversity so seriously, what our findings illuminate is the importance of how policies that are related to socioeconomic diversity are presented to the students. When schools make a big change in their financial-aid policies, it’s a big thing that they obviously want to make public. But they have to be careful of the wording that they use.

Q. So even if a college works really hard to convey the programs it has to support low-SES students in really thoughtful terms, students are still getting messages from lots of other places beyond the college’s control. This is further afield from what you studied, but do you think there are things that the college can do, realizing it’s part of this larger culture of how students think about college and who it’s for?

A. It’s beyond the scope of this paper, and we’d have to do further research before I’d really feel comfortable giving a solid, empirically based answer because we really just focused on this one element of the messages that are coming directly from the college.

The next step is really to take a broader approach and look at a larger group of schools of different types. We want to look at schools that are more elite. State schools. Right now I don’t think I can make a solid hypothesis, even, because it’s likely to vary so much from institution to institution what their cultural norms are, what type of student body they have.

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.