Factors Affecting College Enrollment of First-Generation, Low-Income Students at Charter Schools in California and the Resulting Policy Implications

Abstract

Charter schools and their merit as educational institutions has been the subject of debate since their inception in the early 1990s. Past research on charter schools has primarily focused on things like examining their performance in relation to traditional public schools, but there appeared to have been a gap in the scholarly conversation regarding the efficacy of charter schools for an often overlooked student population—first-generation, low-income (FLI) students. My research, through the use of regression analysis, aims to examine charter schools in California and the factors that make some charter schools better at sending FLI students to college than other schools. These factors include things like the level of academic rigor, the quality of academic advising, and the types of extracurriculars available, to name a few. Such data was manually aggregated into a database by me, with the source data coming from a variety of state databases in California concerning education. Based on the findings—which are not meant to be interpreted as causal in any way—recommendations are then made with respect to education policy. My results indicate that among the various factors that I scrutinized, the level of academic rigor, the quality of advising, and whether or not the school had partnerships or programs with an institution of higher learning seemed to have the most positive influence on the number of FLI students enrolled in college from any given school. On the other hand, factors like professional development programs and graduation capstone projects seemed to negatively affect the rate of college enrollment for FLI students. I contextualize these findings in the greater conversation of education policy and with the nuances from specific schools, and discuss policy implications.