TY - JOUR
T1 - Consolidation of Class Advantages in the Wake of the Great Recession
T2 - University Enrollments, Educational Opportunity and Stratification
AU - Ford, Karly S.
AU - Rosinger, Kelly Ochs
AU - Zhu, Qiong
N1 - Funding Information:
The higher education sector did not escape the impacts of the Great Recession. Public and private institutions were both affected, in differing ways, by the economic downturn. States slashed appropriations for public colleges and universities (Barr and Turner ; Mulhern et al. ). Private institutions, which depend in part on the interest drawn from their endowments, saw huge losses (Brown et al. ). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the major piece of federal legislation passed to mitigate the effects of the recession, contributed to stratifying institutions. ARRA funds earmarked for higher education institutions were mainly directed toward research and development grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. These funds, policymakers argued, were necessary because investment in science and medical research had the potential to drive economic growth. In 2010, private research universities received five times more ARRA allocations than public research universities (Taylor and Cantwell ). In contrast, universities with the lowest research productivity received substantially smaller slices of the recovery act pie. For example, community colleges received almost no ARRA funding (Douglass ). This funding stream flowed to institutions that already had more resources and advantages—increasing the stratification of financial resources by institutional type during the post-recession period.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2021/11
Y1 - 2021/11
N2 - Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student bodies; however, the higher education system is highly stratified. In this paper, we seek to understand stratification in the wake of the Great Recession by examining enrollment among students from differing income backgrounds by institutional type. Two theoretical frameworks suggest different conclusions. A Disaster Capitalism framework suggests that in places where the recession was most severe, enrollment by income would become more stratified than in places where the downturn was less severe. In contrast, Effectively Maintained Inequality would suggest that enrollments were already effectively stratified by income and would not necessarily be sensitive to exposure to an economic shock. Employing fixed effects modeling and novel data based on the tax records of 30 million Americans, we examine income composition by institutional type from 2004 to 2012. We find that although stratification by institutional type worsened during the recession and subsequent recovery, patterns of economic stratification were not more intense for institutions that enrolled students from states hardest hit by the recession. We conclude that these patterns are consistent with an Effectively Maintained Inequality framework. During the recession, the top quintiles continued to enjoy their longstanding disproportionate enrollment in the most selective institutions. For the bottom quintiles, the longstanding marginalization from 4-year college going persisted through the recession. These stratification patterns, however, were not more pronounced in places hardest hit by the recession.
AB - Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student bodies; however, the higher education system is highly stratified. In this paper, we seek to understand stratification in the wake of the Great Recession by examining enrollment among students from differing income backgrounds by institutional type. Two theoretical frameworks suggest different conclusions. A Disaster Capitalism framework suggests that in places where the recession was most severe, enrollment by income would become more stratified than in places where the downturn was less severe. In contrast, Effectively Maintained Inequality would suggest that enrollments were already effectively stratified by income and would not necessarily be sensitive to exposure to an economic shock. Employing fixed effects modeling and novel data based on the tax records of 30 million Americans, we examine income composition by institutional type from 2004 to 2012. We find that although stratification by institutional type worsened during the recession and subsequent recovery, patterns of economic stratification were not more intense for institutions that enrolled students from states hardest hit by the recession. We conclude that these patterns are consistent with an Effectively Maintained Inequality framework. During the recession, the top quintiles continued to enjoy their longstanding disproportionate enrollment in the most selective institutions. For the bottom quintiles, the longstanding marginalization from 4-year college going persisted through the recession. These stratification patterns, however, were not more pronounced in places hardest hit by the recession.
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U2 - 10.1007/s11162-021-09624-0
DO - 10.1007/s11162-021-09624-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 33612921
AN - SCOPUS:85100921716
SN - 0361-0365
VL - 62
SP - 915
EP - 941
JO - Research in Higher Education
JF - Research in Higher Education
IS - 7
ER -