This article examines college-going identity construction for Black, Latino, and Asian American and Pacific Islander high school students. The authors use Marcia's (J Personal Soc Psychol 3(5):551-558, 1966; in: Delson (ed) Handbook of adolescent research, Wiley, New York, 1980) ego identity statuses perspective to examine how students develop…

Through interviews and focus groups with 106 high school juniors and seniors, this research examined the college choice process for Latina and Latino students in the greater Los Angeles basin. Using chain migration theory within a social capital framework, the results indicated that as primarily first-generation college students, the students in…

This paper presents a template for creating a school environment in which college is a reasonable expectation for all students. Drawing from the research literature and lessons learned from more than 4 years of partnership work between a public research university and a cluster of urban K-12 schools, the paper outlines a set of conditions that are…

This paper examines the U.S. college admissions market in the late 1980s and 1990s and how enrollments have shifted, competition has increased, and nonschool-based services have mushroomed. Introduced is the concept of admissions management: a constellation of behaviors which include, among others, the buying of services to help mostly…

Discusses the growing phenomenon of private college counseling services (independent educational consultants, or IECs), using survey results (n=157 IECs) to document their characteristics and those of their users, and considers the implications of the privatization of college counseling for admissions, students' college choice behaviors, and…

This study examines the ways in which social class and high school guidance operations combine to shape a high school student's perceptions of her opportunities for a college education. It is also an analysis of the intersection of family, friends, and school network effects and how they create an individual's biography. Students connect with…

This paper presents a model of college choice that suggests that students' choice of college can be related to perceived "capital conversion" benefits. The model was tested on an evenly distributed sample (n=22,109) of students; one group attending elite colleges (with average freshman Scholastic Assessment Test scores of 1200 or higher)…

This study examined characteristics of independent educational consultants, who provide a new and rapidly growing service, as well as characteristics of their clients who use these consultants in their college search process. The study used data from the Consultant Survey, which was mailed to 317 independent educational consultants of whom 157…

The study examined the ways in which status cultures and organizational environments influence high school students' college decision-making. Interviews were conducted with 12 white female high school seniors from four northern California high schools (a low socio-economic status(SES)/low organization public school, a low-SES/high organization…