Click Here for More Information: An Analysis of College Website Information for Undocumented Students

Abstract

Outside of individual and high school factors, the college choice process for undocumented students in the U.S. is influenced by higher education institutional and contextual factors. Undocumented students face various college access barriers, and access to correct college information is key among these. Literature suggests that inclusionary college access policies of higher education institutions for undocumented students is associated with state policy and demographic characteristics. However, the explicit communication of these policies has not been subject to investigation. The college website is an accessible channel to prospective students where institutions can explicitly display content to inform undocumented students about key information regarding admissibility and financial aid. Despite the lack of this key information being cited as a problem across the system of higher education, little is known about the extent of college information displayed on college websites for undocumented students.

This thesis analyzes institutional websites from a random sample of 200 schools to investigate how and what kind of information they convey regarding undocumented students. Website evaluation criteria, along display of administrative positions and policies and support services offered by a school, is designed to score institutional websites based on the information they share for undocumented students. To identify which institutional types display specific information on admissibility and financial aid information, a comparison of means test is conducted among schools that do and do not share explicit content. Lastly, logistic regression analysis is conducted to estimate the association between contextual factors and the display of admissibility and financial aid information for undocumented students on institutional websites. This analysis is performed on a dataset I created using a series of variables of contextual factors based on existing literature, a novel framework I develop to seek other possible contextual determinants, such as proximity to a sanctuary jurisdiction, and the data found from my website analysis.

Main findings include: (1) 23.5% and 40.5% of sampled HEIs display admissibility and financial aid information for undocumented students, respectively; (2) student body characteristics, urban setting, and institutional class are among the institutional types that, on average, differentiate HEIs that post financial aid and admissibility content for undocumented students from those that do not, at statistically significant levels; (3) when controlling for institutional factors, the display of admissibility information is correlated with the contextual factor of a state’s foreign-born population, while the display of financial aid information is correlated with the contextual factors of more inclusionary state undocumented immigrant policies and the number of immigrant-serving organizations in a state, at statistically significant levels of 5%.