Recruitment Redlining by Public Research Universities in the Los Angeles and Dallas Metropolitan Areas

ABSTRACT

Given racial inequality in the United States is grounded in policies and practices that have historically governed where People of Color live, where colleges go and do not go to recruit prospective students may be an important source of racial inequality in college access. This study examines the spatial distribution of out-of-state recruiting visits to public high schools in the Los Angeles and Dallas metropolitan areas by four public research universities. I develop a conceptual framework that incorporates concepts from critical geography and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) to ground recruiting visits within each metropolitan areas’ sociohistorical spatial politcs. Descriptive statistics and geospatial visualizations reveal that schools in White communities are more likely to receive a recruiting visit, receive multiple visits by each university, and receive visits by more than one university than schools in Communities of Color with comparable income and educational achievement characteristics. Findings also suggest that universities in the study engage in “recruitment redlining”—the circuitous avoidance of predominantly Black and Latinx communities along recruiting visit paths—by mimicking systemic relations of power and racism within geographic space that contribute to the social, economic, and educational disenfranchisement of Communities of Color.

KEY WORDS:

• College access
• geography of college opportunity
• recruiting
• enrollment management

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge the generous support for this research from the American Educational Research Association Dissertation Grant Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Educational Research Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Data about participation in national college fairs from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) website and data about participation in group travel tours were also collected.

2. From prior research (Holland, 2019; Noel-Levitz, 2017, 2018; Stevens, 2007) and conversations with admissions professionals, we find universities that convene the following three broad types of off-campus recruiting events in their travel schedules provided the most complete data: (1) receptions or college fairs at hotels and convention centers; (2) evening college fairs at high schools; and (3) day-time visits at high schools.

3. All four universities in this case study provided recruiting data. Requested data are used in analyses below.

4. This excludes admitted or committed student events, one-on-one interviews, or any other events hosted for already admitted students or focused on determining admission for one particular student.

5. California data come from the California Department of Education. These data include results for students that took the SAT prior to March 2016 that are reported using the “old” scoring methodology and results for students that took the SAT after March 2016 that are reported using the new scoring methodology. SAT school-level data were only available for schools that had more than 15 students taking the SAT to preserve student anonymity. Texas data come from the Texas Education Agency. These data include results for students that took either the SAT or ACT. Texas Education Agency data only included “masked” number of students at the school-level scoring at college readiness benchmarks to preserve student anonymity. For schools determined by Texas Education Agency to be at risk of identification of students, masked intervals were reported from 0–400 in increments of 25. The base interval number was used to estimate the number of students scoring at proficient levels for each school with masked results (e.g., <75 was estimated as 75 students scoring at proficient levels).

6. School choice cities were also not ideal for investigating how recruiting visits interact with racialized spatial politics that have historically segregated and disenfranchised Communities of Color, as some school choice policies have been found to decrease segregation in some cities (e.g., Eschbacher, 2017).

7. If there were more than two universities that provided a relatively comparable number of recruiting visits to the selected metropolitan area, two universities were selected to capture variation of public research universities based on institutional characteristics (e.g., academic profile, enrollments, revenues) and geographical diversity across university cases (i.e., two different regions of the country).

8. To explore whether additional or different insights are gleaned from analyzing the same two universities within the same two metropolitan areas, I conducted a robustness check analyzing recruiting by the only two universities across the project sample that visited both Los Angeles and Dallas as one of their top 5 metropolitan areas: UGA and KU. Overall patterns in the spatial distribution of visits across Los Angeles and Dallas were very similar between the two universities in the robustness check and the four universities in the study. Findings for the robustness check are available upon request.

9. The most visited MSA by the University of Massachusetts Amherst was New York City.

10. The other two most visited MSAs by the University of Kansas were the Chicago and Minneapolis-St.Paul MSAs.

11. The Pew Research Center defines US middle class as households earning two-thirds to double the U.S. median household income while adjusting for size of household and metropolitan-specific cost of living expenses.

12. Predominantly, White clusters are made up of census tracts in which more than 50% of the population identify as White. POC clusters are made up of census tracts in which more than 50% of the population identify as Asian, Black, Latinx, Native American, or multiracial.

13. Some students may not attend the high school within the census tract or school boundary where they live due to an increase in “school choice” and open enrollment policies across the country. However, sources estimate that most students across the country attend public schools within their boundary assigned district (Urban Institute, 2018). Most importantly, given the primary focus of this study is investigating spatial discrimination in recruiting visits rather than individual school discrimination, schools are categorized to geodemographic clusters according to the characteristics of their immediate local community rather than their enrollments or surrounding attendance boundaries.

14. College readiness for California students is defined by the California State Department of Education as scoring at least 530 on the new SAT scoring methodology or 500 on the old methodology for the Math section of the exam.

15. Analyses of which schools received multiple visits are not presented in Table 2 but are available upon request.

16. Predominantly White, Black, Latinx, and Asian census tracts were defined by a 50% population threshold. Black and Latinx integrated tracts are those in which the percentage of Black and Latinx residents collectively make up more than 50% of the population. Asian and Latinx integrated tracts are those in which the percentage of Asian and Latinx residents collectively make up more than 50% of the population. POC integrated areas are defined as those where Asian, Black, Latinx, Native American, and multiracial residents collectively make up more than 50% of the population.

17. The Texas Education Agency defines a combined score of 1180 or higher on the SAT reading, writing, and math sections or a composite ACT score of 24 or higher as scoring at or above criterion for college readiness.