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Very excited to share this new publication! @prabhbob, @ellenberrey, and I find that less selective colleges enroll *fewer* Black students in years they consider race in admissions, the opposite of what we see at the most selective institutions: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23326492211008640
Note that causality is messy here: we don't know what's happening inside the admissions offices, and we don't know what's happening with other forms of recruitment practices (financial aid, outreach), and we only have mediocre controls to understand changing local demographics.
That said, we still find it striking and surprising how different the enrollment patterns are at the most selective schools vs. selective-but-not-that-selective schools:
At a minimum, it suggests that whatever is going on when a less selective school says it "considers race in admission" is very different from what it is going on at Harvard, UT Austin, etc. (which is not so surprising given how different the admissions & enrollment contexts are).
The last line of the abstract summarizes what for me is the most important takeaway for how this helped change my understanding of the interaction of enrollments, admissions policies, and the status order in American higher ed:
"Paradoxically, U.S. American higher education’s contemporary racialized status order roughly consists of higher-status institutions that consider race in admissions but do not enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts,...
middle-status institutions that do not consider race but enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts, and lower-status non-selective institutions that enroll disproportionately high numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students."
With big thanks to everyone who talked through this project with us and read prior versions of the paper, especially @mmlarthur, @rauscher_emily, and @JayantiOwens.
