ROULHAC ENTERPRISES

By Peter Schmidt

Race appears to play a central role in shaping Americans' views on higher-education access, and many see minority students as advantaged and middle-class students as disadvantaged when it comes to opportunity to attend college, according to study results scheduled to be presented next week at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

"What we see from our data is that there are several different groups of Americans who have very different views about who is able to attend college and who is not," said Brian Powell a professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington who is one of the coauthors of a paper on the study's findings.

Their study found that race and ethnicity played a profound role—and income or education level played little role at all—in determining views on college access. On the whole, Americans see minority students as having much greater advantages in seeking access to college than is actually the case, although white people are much more likely than black and Hispanic segments of the population to hold such a view.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Powell said about a fourth of Americans believe it is middle-class Americans who are the worst off, with both minority and low-income students holding a better position, when it comes to college access. "Some Americans believe that low-income families are the most disadvantaged, while others believe that middle-class families are the most disadvantaged," Mr. Powell said. Such divisions are important to take stock of, he argued, because people's perceptions of advantage almost certainly shape their views on matters related to educational policy, as well as their own educational choices.

Mr. Powell conducted the study along with Kristin M. Jordan and Oren Pizmony-Levy, both of whom are doctoral students in sociology at his institution. They based the analysis for their paper, "The Blind Side: Americans' Perceptions of Inequalities in College Access," on data from a national survey of about 1,000 adults conducted in 2007 by Public Agenda and by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, both independent nonprofit research groups.

The survey oversampled people who were black or Hispanic and the parents of children in high school, to make sure there were enough respondents in those categories to allow meaningful comparisons between racial and ethnic groups in terms of respondents' views on matters related to educational access.

The survey asked respondents if they thought that, currently, "the vast majority of people who are qualified to go to college have the opportunity to do so, or do you think there are many people who are qualified to go but don't have the opportunity to do so?" It then listed three segments of the population and asked if each had more, less, or the same amount of opportunity than others to get a college education. The three segments listed were "qualified students who are ethnic or racial minorities such as blacks or Latinos," "qualified students from low-income families," and "qualified students from middle-class families, regardless of their ethnic background."

Varying Perceptions of Opportunities
Over all, nearly 60 percent of respondents said there are many people who are qualified to go to college but don't have the opportunity to do so, while over 40 percent said the vast majority of people who are qualified to go to college have the opportunity to do so.

When it came to perceptions of disadvantage among students qualified to go to college, the largest share of survey respondents, about 43 percent, said students from low-income families have less opportunity than others to attend college. Minority and middle-class students were described as having less opportunity by nearly identical shares of respondents, about 27 percent.

Nearly a fourth of respondents said qualified students who are racial and ethnic minorities have more opportunity to attend college than others. Just under a fifth said students from low-income families have an advantage over others, and about a 10th said qualified students from middle-class families are better off than others when it comes to college access.

The paper characterizes the study's findings as revealing "reverse-discrimination sentiment."

"We believe that the debates regarding affirmative action have played a critical role in people's views," Mr. Powell said, but he hastened to add that the survey data the researchers worked with was insufficient to prove that theory.

In crunching the survey data in a manner that sought to statistically control for variables such as respondents' marital status, employment status, urban residency, and region of residency, the researchers found that those respondents who believed college opportunity was widely available were more likely than others to see all groups as having equal access to such opportunity, while those who perceived a lack of opportunity were more likely than others to perceive the existence of inequalities in access.

Women were significantly less likely than men to believe that the opportunity to attend college is available for most qualified students, and the gender gap remained in place after taking into account respondent characteristics such as income and education level. Having a college degree or a relatively high income level appeared to make a respondent more likely to see college opportunity as widely available, while those respondents who were black or Hispanic were less likely than whites to believe most people who are qualified to go to college have an opportunity to do so.

Controlling for other factors, black and Hispanic respondents were more likely than white ones to think minorities face barriers, while white respondents were more likely than black or Hispanic ones to regard minority students as having an advantage.

On the question of middle-class students' prospects of attending college, black respondents were polarized. They were less likely than others to see middle-class students as being on the same footing as everyone else, but they split on the question of whether they saw middle-class students as better off or worse off when it comes to college access.

Link to story: http://chronicle.com/article/Views-of-Who-Can-Attend/127013/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en