Differential Prediction for Disadvantaged Students and Schools: The Role of High School Characteristics

Abstract

Validity studies of college admissions tests have found that black and Hispanic students typically perform worse in college, as measured by their freshman grade point average (FGPA), than predicted based on college admissions test scores. These studies, however, conflate student and school characteristics when estimating differential prediction. The differential prediction of racial minorities may arise in part because they attend high schools in which all students, regardless of race, perform worse in college than predicted. I examined this using data from the City University of New York. There was no overprediction based on race/ethnicity among students within schools when school characteristics were included in the prediction model. Instead, there was overprediction of FGPA based on school proportion black and Hispanic. Differential prediction associated with schools’ racial composition was greater in models that included high school test scores than in models with college admissions test scores.