Three new studies of college freshmen suggest that even the most promising can run into academic difficulties as a long-term consequence of experiences like attending a violent or run-down high school or being raised by parents who never went to college.
And two of the studies call into question a large body of research on the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity on campuses, concluding that most first-year students do not reap any gains from diversity that can be measured objectively.
Taken together, the studies not only challenge many of the assumptions colleges make in admitting and educating freshmen but could also influence discussions of how to improve the nation’s high schools to promote college preparation.
Most previous studies of college freshmen have based their analyses on individual student characteristics like grades and standardized test scores, without looking at broader questions related to the sorts of learning environments students experienced in high school, says John N. Gardner, who tracks such research as the executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College, a nonprofit consulting group based in Brevard, N.C.
If more education policy makers were aware of how high-school experiences influence long-term student success, Mr. Gardner says, “we might be more inclined as a society to consider even more dramatic ways of restructuring financing” of public schools.
Lingering Effects of Violence
In one of the new studies, discussed last week at the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s annual conference, Mark E. Engberg, an assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago, and Gregory C. Wolniak, a research scientist at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, looked at how high-school experiences influence the academic success of students at several highly selective colleges.
Using data on about 2,500 students taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, which is overseen by Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, the two researchers found that students who enter college with comparable academic records and family backgrounds can have different levels of success in their freshman year, depending on their high-school environment. Those who attended high schools with relatively high levels of violence, for example, tended on average to have lower grades than other freshmen. Having attended a well-maintained and well-equipped high school also appears, in itself, to offer many freshmen advantages over their peers, the study found.
In another study, the results of which were published online last week in the University of Arkansas’s Education Working Paper Archive, Serge Herzog, director of institutional analysis at the University of Nevada at Reno, similarly took data on high-school quality into account in analyzing the records of 2,800 students at a midsize, moderately selective public university.
Mr. Herzog, who does not name the university he examined in the paper discussing his results, found that, even after controlling for differences in background and academic preparation, low-income freshmen tended to post lower grades if their high schools had high levels of violence or disorder, or had enrollments that were heavily black or Hispanic, or had a high percentage of students with limited proficiency in English.
In a finding that runs counter to some other recent research on part-time college faculty members, Mr. Herzog found little evidence of a link between the number of courses students took from adjunct instructors and the likelihood of their dropping out.
Little Benefit From Diversity Found
And, in a finding that contradicts much of the available research on racial and ethnic diversity in higher education, Mr. Herzog found that about the only educational benefit associated with exposure to black, Hispanic, and American Indian students was that it appeared to increase the likelihood that other students from those racial and ethnic groups would stay in college to complete their degrees.
Using objective measures of learning, Mr. Herzog did not find any evidence that being exposed to diversity in their classrooms or taking classes intended to promote appreciation of diversity fostered students’ cognitive growth.
In a similar study of the same university whose results were published a year ago, Mr. Herzog examined data on 6,000 graduates and found no correlation between individual students’ exposure to diversity and their cumulative academic achievement based on objective measures like grade-point averages, GRE test scores, or graduate-school enrollment.
In another study of college freshmen discussed at this year’s Association for the Study of Higher Education conference, two doctoral students in higher education at the University of Iowa, Ryan D. Padgett and Megan P. Johnson, examined data on about 3,100 students from 19 colleges. The data was collected as part of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, a continuing study of what students who entered colleges in the fall of 2006 have learned since.
The Iowa researchers found that the educational benefits of taking part in various programs promoting diversity were “minimal and inconsistent.”
Focusing on freshmen who were the first in their families to attend college, Mr. Padgett and Ms. Johnson concluded that such students do not necessarily benefit from educational practices shown to help students whose parents did attend college. For example, while other students appear to benefit from interactions with faculty members, those first-generation students who experienced the most interaction with faculty members generally had the worst educational outcomes, suggesting they “have not been conditioned to the positive benefits of interacting with instructors,” the researchers’ paper summarizing their conclusions said.
