Individuals in Institutional Contexts: A Reexamination of Factors Influencing Degree Attainment

The recent controversy surrounding the confluence of measured intelligence, socioeconomic status and race has focused on establishing and denying causal links between individual attributes. Far less attention has been paid to the institutional structures where the relationships between individual attributes are situated. By contrast, this paper looks at the probability of obtaining a bachelor's degree as a function of institutional as well as individual factors. Based on ten years of longitudinal data collected on the high school class of 1982, we estimate base models that establish links between the probability of degree completion and measured intelligence, socioeconomic status, and race. The base models are then extended so as to locate the degree-attainment process in an institutional context: individual level data are matched with institutional data, including enrollment history, institutional availability of financial aid, and race-specific student enrollment and retention rates. The results indicate significant interaction effects between individual and institutional attributes. We find, for example, that the influence of financial aid varies across racial and ethnic groups, even after controlling for measured intelligence and socioeconomic status. Surprisingly, the strongest relationship between degree attainment and race-specific retention rates are found for white students, suggesting that in our models, race-specific retention rates may serve as a proxy for unmeasured variables, such as institutional quality.