Do aspirational role models inspire or backfire? Perceived similarity mediates the effect of role models on minority students’ college choices

ABSTRACT

Drawing from psychological theory, an aspirational role model within college marketing materials may cause prospective students to be willing to make similar enrollment and academic choices if the role model is perceived as similar to themselves. Therefore, we predicted that prospective, minority students exposed to a role model of the same, rather than different, ethnicity will be more willing to enroll in the same institution and make similar academic choices. Further, we predicted perceived similarity may mediate the effect of role model ethnicity on academic choices. To experimentally test our predictions, we presented 151 prospective, minority students (49% Black, 32.5% Hispanic, 18.5% Asian) with alumni profiles that varied in regard to ethnicity (same ethnicity, White) and accomplishment (modest, extreme). Prospective students then rated perceived similarity with the alumni and willingness to make similar academic choices. A series of analyses confirmed our predictions. Prospective, minority students were more willing to make similar choices when presented with a role model of the same, rather than different, ethnicity. As predicted, perceived similarity mediated the effect of role model ethnicity on academic choices. Interestingly, accomplishments of the alumni did not affect students’ choices. Implications for recruiting students of color in higher education are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• College marketing
• role models
• exemplars
• students of color
• racial/ethnic minority

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Data is publicly available via the Open Science Foundation and can be accessed via the following link: https://osf.io/dg8p4/?view_only=ae93776ba3d24eb3998a463e9b4f7cba

Data deposition

Data is publicly available via the Open Science Foundation and can be accessed via the following link: https://osf.io/dg8p4/?view_only=ae93776ba3d24eb3998a463e9b4f7cba

Geolocation information

Azusa, CA, USA

Notes

1 Fifty-seven of our participants (38% of the sample) reported an age between 18 and 24 years, which the NCES suggests is a traditional college-age population. To determine whether our findings were not driven by the older, non-traditional students included in our sample, we analyzed our data using only participants whose ages ranged from 18–24 years. When we excluded non-traditional students, we found the same pattern of results. Indeed, 18- to 24-year-old prospective college students perceived significantly greater similarity with a role model of their same, rather than White, ethnicity, t(56) = 4.95, p < .001, d = .66. They were also significantly more likely to make similar academic choices as a role model of their same, rather than White, ethnicity, t(56) = 2.11, p < .05, d = .28. Again, as predicted, and fitting with the pattern of results reported, perceived similarity mediated the relation between the race of the role models presented and participants’ likelihood of engaging in similar college choices, F(1, 55) = 32.52, p < .001, r² = .37. The dataset and study materials are publicly available via the Center for Open Science, https://osf.io/dg8p4/?view_only=ae93776ba3d24eb3998a463e9b4f7cba.