Scholarship on college choice largely focuses on how students search for colleges but less is known about how colleges recruit students. This article analyzes off-campus recruiting visits for 15 public research universities. We Web-scrape university admissions websites and issue public records requests to collect data on recruiting visits.…

This article documents collective memories of the founding, curriculum, and attendees of one of the first (1866) Reconstruction Era Quaker-Freedmen School sites in the Southeastern United States. It applies critical oral history methodology including the collection of primary documents, previous investigations into the school, and interviews of…

Scholarship on the links between families and schools encompasses contradictory notions about social capital and its relation to inequality. One view holds that schools can narrow inequality by generating dense relationships among families, while others suggest that advantaged parents can use these networks to hoard opportunities. This multiple…

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment…

Using a multimethod approach, we investigate whether gender gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) major declaration in college are explained by differences in the grades that students earn in STEM versus non-STEM subjects. With quantitative data, we find that relative advantages in college academic performance in STEM…

This study examines the impact of a "natural experiment" that gave students the choice to place into or out of developmental math because of an unintended mistake made by a community college. During self-placement, more students chose to enroll in gateway college- and transfer-level math courses, however, greater proportions of female,…