Academic culture beyond the individual: Group-level norms and college enrollment

Although many scholars have written about culture in schools and discuss culture as a group-level phenomenon, quantitative studies tend to empirically examine culture at the individual-level. This study presents a group-level conceptualization of academic culture known as cultural heterogeneity—the presence of a diverse array of competing and conflicting cultural models—to examine whether variation in school-level academic orientation predicts college enrollment. We use the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS) to show that whereas academic press (or average school academic culture) is positively related to enrollment, variation in school academic culture is associated with declines in enrollment. These findings hold net of students’ own academic behaviors and beliefs, background factors, and school characteristics. Thus, exposure to conflicting models of culture can lead youth to make decisions that do not reflect broader societal goals. This study addresses the misalignment between the conceptual and empirical definitions of culture in education by examining the link between school academic culture measured as a group-level process, which is consistent with how scholars discuss culture, and college enrollment.