MaryBeth Walpole

Socioeconomic Status and College: How SES Affects College Experiences and Outcomes

This study investigated college experiences and outcomes for low and high SES students utilizing data from a longitudinal database. Low SES students engaged in fewer extracurricular activities, worked more, studied less, and reported lower GPAs than their high SES peers. Nine years after entering college, the low SES students had lower incomes, educational attainment, and graduate school attendance than high SES students. These experiential and outcome differences are tied to differences in cultural capital and habitus.

THIS TEST IS UNFAIR Urban African American and Latino High School Students' Perceptions of Standardized College Admission Tests

This qualitative study explored the perceptions of, knowledge regarding, and preparation for standardized college admissions exams of 227 urban African American and Latino high school students. Findings include the students’lack of information about the test and their reliance on their relatively uninformed and unavailable school officials for information, preparation strategies, strategies for achieving high scores, stress level due to the necessity of high test scores, and beliefs that the tests are an unfair obstacle. Students’knowledge of and strategies for preparing and taking the tests are conceptualized as cultural capital and habitus utilizing a Bourdieuian framework.

Race, Class, Gender and Community College Persistence Among African American Women

This inquiry is an exploration of the educational trajectories of African American women community college students. We compare the persistence of African American women to African American men and to all women college students using the 1996/2001 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey and the 1993/2003 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Survey. We find that the propensity of African American women to enroll notwithstanding, African American women attending community colleges are less likely to graduate than their African American male peers and than their female peers. However, we also find that African American women who start at community colleges and complete a Bachelor degree are similar to African American men and all women who pursue graduate degrees. This implies that greater attention to the trajectories of African American women through the community college is warranted as the majority of those entering postsecondary education do so at the community college. Assisting these women in succeeding in community colleges and in transferring is critical because Bachelor degree attainment is key to ensuring equitable outcomes.

Book Review: Reworking the Student Departure Puzzle:

John Braxton’s edited collection Reworking the Student Departure Puzzle is an ambitious call for reinvigorating the work on student retention. The undergraduate attrition rate has remained consistent during the last century, with almost half of all students who enter two and four year colleges leaving without a degree (Tinto, 1993). Many of those who do not persist are low income and students of color. Clearly something must be done to repair this enormous leak in the educational pipeline. Tinto’s (1993) seminal work on student retention has come under fire for several reasons, including its theoretical approach, assimilationist stance and mixed empirical results (Braxton, Sullivan, & Johnson, 1997). The last of those reasons serves as the impetus for this edited volume. As the editor of this new book, Braxton has engaged numerous higher education scholars in a reexamination of Tinto’s work and in a quest for new methodological and theoretical approaches to the study what he has labeled “the departure puzzle.” In the first chapter, Braxton and Leigh Lien review existing empirical research on retention utilizing Tinto’s framework of persistence as a function of academic and social interaction. The evidence supports the importance of social integration; however, the results on academic integration are mixed. Although there is some evidence that academic integration does affect eventual persistence, particularly in multi-institutional tests, the evidence is modest according to Braxton and Lien. While many scholars may wish to abandon Tinto’s constructs altogether, the authors of this chapter believe that a reconsideration of academic integration is a worthy endeavor. Edward St. John, Alberto Cabrera, Amaury Nora and Asker examine the incorporation of economic variables into retention studies in the second chapter. They thoroughly summarize quantitative research on the role of economics in