WITHIN-COLLEGE HUMAN CAPITAL AND RACIAL ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE*
Kenneth I. Spenner
Duke University
Sarah Mustillo
Purdue University
Nathan D. Martin
Duke University
April 2, 2008
Word Count: 8,978
Running Head: Within-College Human Capital and Academic Performance
*Direct correspondence to Kenneth Spenner, Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 27708; email: . The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for this research provided by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Duke University. The authors bear sole responsibility for the contents of the paper.
Ken Spenner is Professor of Sociology and Psychology, and Director of the Markets & Management Studies Program at Duke University. Over the years his research has focused on careers, work and personality, technology and market transitions in Eastern Europe. In recent years his research centers various aspects of undergraduate education at an elite university, using the Campus Life and Learning data.
Sarah Mustillo is an Associate Professor of Sociology and faculty associate with the Center for Aging and the Life Course at Purdue University. Her research focuses on medical sociology and quantitative methodology with particular interests in child mental health, family well-being and longitudinal models. Substantively, much of her work investigates the ways in which adverse mental health outcomes are transmitted from parent to child. Quantitatively, her work involves issues of modeling change over time with categorical dependent variables. Additionally, she has interests in racial and ethnic differences in health and educational achievement.
Nathan Martin is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and research assistant for the Campus Life and Learning Project. His general research and scholarly interests include education, globalization, labor and work, social theory, and inequality. He is currently working on his dissertation, which explores social class in contemporary US post-secondary education. A recent article (with David Brady) examining unionization in less developed countries appeared in American Sociological Review.
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WITHIN-COLLEGE HUMAN CAPITAL AND RACIAL ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
ABSTRACT
The academic performance gap has received substantial scholarly attention. Most studies of human capital investigate pre-college explanations for the gap, or in panel studies, fixed independent variables. Our paper addresses this lacuna by investigating within-college variations in human capital in three areas: academic and intellectual skills; self-esteem, academic self-confidence, and student identity; and academic effort and engagement. How do variations during college in these capital areas affect the trajectories of academic performance as measured by semester-by-semester grade point average? Data for this analysis come from the Campus Life and Learning Project, a panel study of two recent cohorts of students attending Duke University and surveyed before college and during the first, second and fourth college years. The data show that black students narrow the achievement gap at the start of college by about 60 percent over the college career. A latent growth curve model is used to estimate the effects of fixed and changing capital measures on academic performance trajectories. Consistent with theorizing, four of nine indicators of within-college capital have statistically significant but small associations with increases in GPA: work hard attributions, the importance of a good student identity, self-assessed ability, and self-assessed smartness. A fixed effects model generally confirms these results and eliminates unobserved heterogeneity as an explanation. Within-college capital variations do help us understand the racial ethnic performance gap but do not explain a large share of the gap.
WITHIN-COLLEGE HUMAN CAPITAL AND RACIAL ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
Gaps in academic performance among racial and ethnic groups persist at all levels of education in the United States. Bowen and Bok’s (1998) seminal study refocused attention on such gaps in higher education. They found the differences are large (for example, 30 percentile points between black and white college students in the College and Beyond sample), enduring over recent decades, and perhaps even somewhat larger in the most selective institutions. Most studies that attempt to explain the gap in terms of human capital factors focus on pre-college differences in human capital and generally find that pre-college factors account for up to about one-half of the black-white gap (Bowen and Bok 1998; Massey et al. 2003; see Jencks and Phillips [1998] for review). Below we present new evidence that the academic achievement gap among racial and ethnic groups at an elite university declines substantially over the course of the college career even after controlling for pre-college factors. This raises the important question: what accounts for the decline?
The research that attempts to understand the gap contains several lacunae. First, the typical study design is cross-sectional or a limited panel, and includes controls for pre-college socioeconomic and family background factors, and perhaps single-point in time measures of within-college capital such as test scores or major choice. Studied outcomes include verbal, quantitative and subject matter competence, cognitive skills and growth, grades, persistence in school, and graduation rates. Fine-grained studies of within-college capital acquisition are in more limited supply (Pascarella and Terenzini [2005] provide comprehensive review). For example, how do effort, time use and academic engagement differ over the course of college among white, black, Asian and Latino students? Do racial and ethnic differentials in academic self-concept and identities help us understand trajectories of academic achievement?
Second, the major methodological challenge to such designs is unobserved heterogeneity. How do we know the design measured all of the capital factors that might explain the gap? Left out unmeasured factors will bias estimates of the gap (Allison 1994; Halaby 2004). A few studies in economics attempt to control for unobserved heterogeneity but few to none of the studies in education and sociology using college samples attempt such controls, for example with fixed-effects, panel designs (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005: 67). Our study design offers a contribution in attempting to control for unobserved heterogeneity in a multi-point panel design taken over the college years, with fixed and random effects statistical models.
Our research design features a prospective panel study of two entering cohorts at an elite Southern university. A probability sample of entering students were surveyed in the summer before starting college and then in the spring semester of the first, second and fourth college years. As a dependent variable for academic achievement we use semester grade point average (GPA) in the spring semester of each survey year as taken from Registrar’s records.
WITHIN-COLLEGE CAPITAL
Human capital generally refers to the knowledge, skills, health and values that people possess (Becker 1975). Human capital is distinct from the financial capital and physical assets that people hold. We also hold it conceptually distinct from (but correlated with) cultural (Bourdieu 1986) and social capital (Coleman 1988), which we have or will address with our panel study elsewhere (XXXXX 2005; XXXXX 2008). For this paper, our interest is in forms of human capital that are changeable during college and that might be germane to academic performance. Our reading of the literature identifies three sub-types of human capital within college populations: (1) academic and intellectual skills; (2) global and specific (academic) self-esteem, academic self-confidence, and identity; and (3) academic effort and engagement. This conceptualization is not exhaustive but rather is aimed at capturing the major variations, and ones that are susceptible to reasonable measurement in a panel design.
Academic and Intellectual Skills
Pascarella and Terenzini (2005: 65-75) review a large body of research that shows an increase by a quarter to nearly a full standard deviation over the college career in a set of subject-matter and general academic competencies and skills. These skills include: understanding fundamental concepts or theories, applying knowledge and concepts, analyzing ideas and arguments, synthesizing and integrating information, oral expression and writing. The measures in various studies include both standardized and self-report measures of skills (Maes et al. 1996; Thorndike and Andrieu-Parker 1992). These skills are related to earned grades.
The few studies that examine racial and ethnic differences in changes in these skills are inconsistent. For example, Myerson and colleagues (1998) find that black students experience larger gains in the Armed Forces Qualification Test (a composite of verbal and quantitative scores) compared with a cohort of white students in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, after controlling for SES and age. In contrast, Flowers (2002) reports that black students experienced significantly smaller gains on standardized tests compared with white students, using data from the National Study of Student Learning and data from 56 institutions in the College Basic Academic Subject Examination, and a more extensive set of controls including demographics, pre-college test scores, indicators of academic effort, and social involvement in college life.
Global and Specific Self-Esteem, Academic Self-Confidence and Identity
Self-esteem (global) generally refers to an individual’s attitude toward the self as a totality (Rosenberg et al. 1995). Self-esteem has been linked to academic performance in a number of studies (Osborne 1995; Massey et al. 2003; Morgan and Mehta 2004), including racial and ethnic differences in such. Few studies address within-college differences, and most studies are interested in self-esteem as an outcome rather than a cause of academic performance, a possibility that we will examine.
Rosenberg and colleagues (1995) suggest that specific self-esteem -- in this case academic self-concept -- is more closely related to behavioral outcomes including academic performance as measured by grades compared with global self-esteem. Data from the Youth in Transition Study support their argument for high school boys. We will examine variations in both global and specific (academic) self-esteem.
Closely related to self-esteem, academic self-confidence refers to a person’s judgment about the likelihood that their actions will lead to a successful academic outcome. Psychological research has long held (Bandura 1982) that people who are confident in their ability are more likely to endure and persist in the face of difficulty, likely a resource in challenging academic settings.
Identities refer to self-in-role meanings for role incumbents and group members (i.e., parent, fraternity member, good student) (see Burke [2004] for theoretical statement and review; Reitzes and Burke [1980] specifically address the college student identity). Identities have affective, motivational and behavioral implications. For the college student identity, one key dimension of role performance is academic achievement. The college student identity might vary over the college career as a function of earlier academic performances, one’s social networks, and intellectual climate in courses and social settings. We posit that closer identification with being a good student will yield stronger academic performance and improved academic performance over time. As a corollary, those with stronger identification with a good student role should invest more time and energy in academic matters and engagement in the academic enterprise in college, which introduces the third area of within-college capital.
Academic Effort and Engagement
Research in education, economics and sociology shows that college students vary in the levels of effort and academic engagement in college and these variations are positively associated with a range of outcomes, including test scores, subject matter competencies, and other measures of academic performance and skill acquisition (Astin 1993; Pascarella and Terenzini [2005:119-120] provide review). Our focus will be on several sub-dimensions of this broader concept.
Effort attributions refer to the self-inferences that students make about the role of their own effort in academic tasks, for example the extent to which they worked hard in challenging academic courses. At the level of individual challenging courses, we find that effort attributions do predict course grade outcomes (XXXXX 2006).
A number of studies address the role of time use, or hours spent studying, as an indicator of effort and academic engagement (Schuman et al. 1985; Rau and Durand 2000; Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner 2004). Most studies show small-to-modest positive effects of time spent studying and in related activities on indicators of academic performance, although there is disagreement about the size of effects and the optimal measures of time use (see exchange between Schuman [2001] and Rau [2001] and detailed methodological work by Juster and Stafford [1991]). In general, multiple and more detailed measures provide larger estimates of the effects of study time on outcomes (Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner 2004). We posit that time use varies over the college career and we investigate whether such variations are related to trajectories of academic performance. One weakness of time use measures is that they do not directly capture the efficiency with which students expend time, which might vary substantially over time and is a function of a myriad of factors. Our design includes some information on effective time management, which we bring in to adjust for this limitation.
Finally, the larger education literature suggests multiple dimensions of academic engagement are positively associated with knowledge acquisition and academic performance (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005). This might include not only time allocation but engagement of faculty and fellow students to work on challenging material, use of tutoring and academic skills centers and advisors, particularly for students having academic difficulty, and engaging resources at the class level that might assist in challenging classes, such as teaching assistants, organized review sessions, and peer study groups. More generally, we posit that academic engagement varies over the college career, and perhaps by racial and ethnic group, and may be associated with trajectories of academic achievement.
DESIGN, MEASURES AND METHODS
Study Design
The larger research design, The Campus Life and Learning Project (CLL), involves a multi-year, prospective panel study of two consecutive incoming cohorts of students admitted to Duke University and who accepted admission (incoming classes of 2001 and 2002; graduating classes of 2005 and 2006). Duke is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina with a total undergraduate enrollment of about 6,000 students from the United States and a number of foreign countries. The sampling frame included undergraduate students who planned to enroll in the college of arts & sciences and in the engineering school. The design randomly selected about one-third of white students, about two-thirds of Asian students, all black and Latino students, and about one-third of bi- and multi-racial students, based upon self-reported racial ethnic status on the admission application form.[1] In contrast to studies that examine samples from multiple institutions, this study is designed to capture the rich details of students’ experiences at a single institution with multiple data points and merges of various types of institutional data, usually unavailable in other studies.