Well-Placed: The Geography of Opportunity and High School Effects on College Attendance

Recent work has broadened the scope of school effectiveness research to consider not only academic achievement but also other outcomes, especially college attendance. This literature has argued that high schools are an important determinant of college attendance, with some contending that high schools matter more for college attendance than for academic achievement. A separate branch of research has illustrated how place-based opportunities facilitate college attendance. We merge these two literatures by asking if schools’ geographic context can explain apparent variation in effectiveness among Wisconsin high schools. We find that geographic context explains more than a quarter of the variance in traditional estimates of school effectiveness on college attendance, because factors like proximity to colleges are strongly associated with college attendance. Accounting for geography is therefore important in order not to overstate high schools’ role in higher education outcomes. Results are based on multilevel models applied to rich administrative data on every Wisconsin public high school entrant between 2006 and 2011.