High School Hangover and Minority College Achievement

This paper uses 10 years of enrollment data at four Texas public universities to examine whether, to what extent, and in what ways racial and ethnic differences in college achievement can be traced to high school attended. To identify school attributes responsible for unequal college readiness, we estimate fixed effects models for three high school strata defined by their socioeconomic composition. We find that high school affluence does not insulate minority students from achievement disparities vis-à-vis their same school classmates beyond the first semester. Furthermore, high school influences on academic achievement carry over through the college career at least through 4-year graduation, but only at institutions with selective admissions.