In the latest issue of RSF, “The Coleman Report at Fifty”, leading education scholars examine the methods and conclusions of the 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity Report—also known as the Coleman Report—through the lens of social science advances over the past half century. Commissioned by Congress as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the report revealed pervasive school segregation by race, among other inequalities, and began a national dialogue on educational opportunity for minority children.

An article in the new issue by Barbara Schneider (Michigan State University) and Guan Saw (University of Texas, San Antonio) traces how racial disparities in college attendance have changed since the release of the Coleman Report, which found that although African Americans in the 1960s aspired to attend college at a higher rate than whites, their rate of college enrollment was still much lower. In their research, which draws from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, Schneider and Saw find today, nearly 60 percent of high school students aspire to obtain at least a bachelor degree when they are in ninth grade and eleventh grade. However, as the graph below shows, only about 30 percent of students enroll in a four-year college in the fall immediately after their high school graduation.

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The Coleman Report suggested that discrepancies between blacks and whites in college enrollment rates could be traced to the fact that black students lacked concrete knowledge about college, especially information on college requirements and course offerings. Racial disparities in enrollment persist today; in 2012, only 36.4% of the black population between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four were enrolled in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, compared to 42.1% of whites. But Schneider and Saw find that most high schools now have instituted programs to assist students in acquiring college knowledge and admission information. As they write, “It would seem that, even though minority students are receiving college information, that information alone is not enough to help them make a successful postsecondary transition.”

The authors argue that academic preparation—or taking advanced courses, such as Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) classes—has become a major stratification mechanism, especially for low-income minority students. They find that black, Hispanic, and multiracial students tend to take lower-level courses in mathematics than white and Asian students, and that black students are least likely of all groups to earn AP or IB credits, in part because in many low-income schools where minorities are concentrated, there are fewer teachers who are able to teach the more advanced courses in subjects such as math and science. They conclude, “These results suggest that it is the stratification of the learning opportunities that students experience in school rather than their personal effort that is the major factor impacting their transition from high school to college.”

The article is available in full from the RSF journal website.