At the Intersection of College Access and Spatial Justice: Geographic Accessibility of Broad Access Colleges in Metropolitan Areas

Abstract

The built environment creates and sustains unequal access to opportunity across communities—be it to parks, grocery stores or as evidenced in this study, less selective colleges. Studies of accessibility in urban planning document disproportionately lower accessibility to a range of opportunities for low-income communities and communities of color. Accessibility to higher education matters because students who live close to a college are more likely to enroll. Yet, colleges are unequally distributed across the country and within cities.

Drawing on theories of spatial justice, this study examines the relationship between census tract demographics and the geographic accessibility of less selective colleges in two regions—Lansing, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois. In Part I, I employ the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis (KW) test to examine whether neighborhood demographics differ based on the presence or absence of a less selective college, its sector, and its status as a main versus branch campus. I find that tracts in public college neighborhoods have a lower median income, higher poverty rate, and a higher percentage of Black residents than non-college tracts—suggestive of increased accessibility for these communities. However, retention rates, graduation rates, mean six- and ten-year earnings, and student loan repayment rates are all lowest at the colleges nearest to high poverty tracts or tracts that are predominantly residents of color.

In Part II, I calculate cumulative accessibility to less selective public colleges using an index adapted from the urban planning literature. I then partition tracts into high and low accessibility sub-groups and compare demographics using the KW test. I find that Lansing’s high accessibility tracts have the highest poverty rates and highest percentage of residents of color across the region, but low accessibility tracts have the highest percentage of residents with less than an associate degree. In Chicago, low accessibility tracts are lower income, higher poverty, and higher proportion residents of color than high accessibility tracts. When I examine these relationships using a spatial regression, I find a negative relationship between accessibility and potential educational demand in both study areas. In Chicago, the relationship between accessibility and a tract’s poverty rate is also negative. The relationships to accessibility for racial composition measures are less consistent in their magnitude, direction, and statistical significance level.

I conclude that local geographic access is another axis along which spatial processes may accumulate unfavorably for populations historically excluded from or underserved by higher education, though the patterns of accessibility are unlikely to follow a single narrative across metropolitan areas. Patterns will differ depending on the way in which college campus locations intersect with neighborhood level demographic changes over time. Systemic inequalities are embedded in the built environment and likely contribute to lower levels of educational attainment in tracts with low access to less selective colleges in either Lansing or Chicago. Improving student success at less selective colleges, which serve primarily local student populations, requires understanding how geographic accessibility interacts with student outcomes. In pursuit of this goal, I develop a toolkit prototype that institutional practitioners can use to assess how geographic access varies across their student population, and whether this variation is correlated with differences in academic outcomes.