Sarri Family Fellowship for Research on Educational Attainment of Children in Low Income Families

By Briana Starks

Project Description

My commitment to underrepresented students is evident in both my research and service work. I find the balance of engaging in meaningful scholarship to highlight the inequalities in higher education with my mentoring work for pipeline programs to increase retention of talented undergraduates from diverse backgrounds as the foundation for my passion and drive. I know firsthand that higher education can serve as a catalyst for growth and development in individuals and communities, and I feel privileged to get to play a small part in the journey of others as they pursue their goals. My dissertation is a project that investigates an alternative pathway to the standard life course trajectory and what this deviation means for women with regards to themselves, their families, and their financial wellbeing. Over 22% of all college students in the U.S. are caring for children. Yet their graduation rates are suboptimal and their experiences are largely unknown. This project investigates the subjugated narratives of low-income student mothers at one elite four-year university to understand how policies promote or hinder their degree attainment and the subsequent degree attainment of their children.

By Emma Bausch

Project Description

My dissertation uses the behavioral economic theory of mental accounting to consider how prospective students and their families compare financial aid offers, think about paying for college, and eventually choose a college. College is expensive; since the 1980s, a combination of rising tuition and persistent reductions in state/federal funding has transferred the primary financial responsibility of college costs from the government to the family. Low-income families are increasingly reliant on a labyrinthine system of grants (federal, state, and institutional), loans. Compounding this, financial aid offer letters are often confusing, or worse, misleading (some institutions lump aid together, making it hard to differentiate between loans and grants). In my dissertation, I utilize a mixed methods research design. First, I interview 30 families, interpreting how they make sense of their experiences reviewing aid offers via three longitudinal semi-structured interviews. These results inform an experiment, where I administer a survey to over 400 families and use statistical analyses to estimate how known heuristics may predict enrollment probabilities. Understanding how families compare aid offers can reveal more about how and why families choose and pay for a particular college, as well as the social context from which they make decisions. Furthermore, a deeper appreciation of how low-income families interpret aid letters will inform both policymakers and institutions looking to best communicate financial aid offers to low-income students.

By Andres Pinedo

Project Description

Ethnic Studies enrollment has been linked with positive academic outcomes such as increased attendance, improved GPAs, and greater odds of graduation. Yet, while these outcomes have been documented in previous research, little work has examined the intermediary processes (i.e. mediators) that connect ethnic studies enrollment to desired academic outcomes. That is, what changes within students that explains these gains? Previous research suggests that, ethnic studies improves outcomes by connecting students’ education to important issues in their communities which leads to greater school engagement and relevance. Additionally, many educators who implement ethnic studies argue that a major goal of this type of curriculum is to foster students’ critical consciousness–the critical understanding of, drive to challenge, and action against inequality– and this may also link ethnic studies enrollment to desired outcomes because critical consciousness has been linked to desired academic outcomes in previous research. Thus, in our study, we will examine the impact of ethnic studies on academic outcomes to see if previous links replicate in this sample, and to extend previous scholarship, we will assess whether school engagement and critical consciousness mediate these links. This research will help teachers and administrators understand the efficacy of ethnic studies for improving students outcomes and hopefully help ethnic studies be more widely adopted across the state and country.

By Elizabeth Burland

Project Description

There are well-documented gaps in both college attendance and completion rates by income and wealth and there is evidence that these gaps have increased over time. Previous research has focused on whether students go to college and where they go to college with a number of successful interventions that increase student enrollment in post-secondary institutions. However, we know less about why these interventions have been successful. This study examines the decision-making process that students engage in after high school, and how differences in decision-making might contribute to the gaps in educational outcomes. We know that geographic, school, peer, and home contexts are factors in the decision to attend college, but more research is needed to understand how these influence the process of student decision-making. Using a semi-structured interview methodology, this study investigates three research questions. (1) How do students make decisions about what to pursue after high school, and what resources do they use? (2) How do school, family, and geographic contexts shape these decisions? (3) How do interventions like the HAIL scholarship and other financial aid interventions influence student decisions and how does this vary by geographic and school context? 

 

By Elizabeth Bruch and Anne Clark

Project Description

By Elizabeth Bruch and Anne Clark

Project Description

Educational equity consists of not only equality in resources and opportunities, but also equality in the range of future selves that children have the freedom to imagine and become in terms of ambition, self-confidence, and interests. This has not only moral but also financial implications. For college to be transformative for life chances, not only must we reduce selection into college attendance. Students also need to have equal access to majors that yield the highest economic dividends, which tend to require a strong math background (Kim, Tamborini, and Sakamoto 2015). And yet, women are less likely to choose those majors and underrepresented minorities, despite high interest, are less likely to be prepared for and therefore persist in them (Riegle-Crumb and King 2010; Xie, Fang, and Shauman 2015). Given the strong correlation between race and socioeconomic status (Condron 2009), this race gap in major perpetuates socioeconomic gaps in education and earnings.

Interventions seeking to prevent disparities in postsecondary majors should focus on elementary and middle school, as high school may be too late to make significant impacts. First, tracking of students into ability-differentiated math classes begins in middle school as a function of both preferences and academic performance (Catsambis 1994; Gamoran 1992). This tracking is highly stable (Hallinan 1996) and has implications for college attendance and major selection, as many high schools allow students to move out of but not into college preparatory tracks (Domina, Penner, and Penner 2017). Second, children begin developing career aspirations and expectations as early as elementary school. Their perceptions of their ability and its implications for their future prospects then become increasingly calcified in high school (Hartung, Porfeli, and Vondracek 2005). However, current research is limited in its ability to inform the co-evolution of inequalities in math performance and disparities in math identity (i.e., enjoyment of and self- confidence in math) because these two strands of educational equity are generally studied separately at the elementary and secondary school level. Research on racial inequalities in education tends to focus on performance and attainment gaps between Whites and Asians on one hand and underrepresented minorities on the other due to income inequality and segregation into different public schools (with racial disparities in educational aspirations treated as symptomatic of these structural inequalities) (Condron 2009; Domina, Penner, and Penner 2017). With the closing of the gender gap in test scores in elementary and secondary schools, gender scholarship increasingly focuses on the persistent gap in the desire to pursue math-based careers stemming from cultural messaging that math is masculine (Riegle-Crumb and Morton 2017; Xie, Fang, and Shauman 2015).

Studying the race gap in test scores and degree attainment separately from the gender gap in attitudes towards subjects like math leaves inconsistencies unexamined. Generally, researchers have found that performance, interest, and self-confidence in school subjects are highly correlated, and yet a growing body of evidence shows that this correlation is weaker for girls and underrepresented minorities (Denissen, Zarrett, and Eccles 2007). Notably, minority students are more likely to maintain positive math identities (i.e., to like math and feel confident in their math abilities) despite low test scores (Riegle-Crumb, Moore, and Ramos-Wada 2011). Uncovering why may be key to both developing strategies to improve girls’ math identities and determining which unique strengths in minority students can be leveraged to improve their math performance.

Social psychological research on stereotype threat and impostor syndrome has provided some clues as to the underlying processes simultaneously affecting math performance and identity. According to work on stereotype threat, the existence of negative stereotypes for one’s racial or gender group lowers both self-perceived and actual performance through both fear of conforming to the stereotype and demotivation due to devaluation by peers and mentors (von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, and McFarlane 2015). Over time, this leads to disidentification with the field. In contrast, the imposter syndrome literature focuses on situations in which women and minorities disidentify with the field and may have low self-perceived performance, but do not actually underperform compared to white men (Dasgupta 2011). Individuals from underrepresented groups feel they do not belong based on the demographic composition of the field and lose confidence. Even if their performance is not affected, their self-doubt compels them to switch to a field in which they feel more comfortable and have more confidence. While one theory relies more heavily on negative stereotypes and the other on underrepresentation to trigger effects on identity and/or performance, many fields in which women and minorities are underrepresented also contain negative stereotypes about them. Many negative stereotypes about women and minorities’ competence and competencies are also not field-specific (e.g., that white people are more intellectual than black individuals, that women are more emotional and less analytical than men). Therefore, it is unclear when someone may experience negative effects on identity but not performance (imposter syndrome) and when an individual may suffer negative impacts on both identity and performance (stereotype threat). Furthermore, neither theory can inform why individuals may be able to maintain positive identity despite poor performance.

By Sonya Dal Cin and Neil Lewis, Jr.