Performing Social Closure: How College Board Geomarkets Structure Recruiting Visits by Selective Colleges

Ozan Jaquette, Associate Professor in the Department of Education, is presenting a working paper at the Stanford Pathways Network seminar series, where he examines how third-party “market devices” structure the recruiting behavior of selective colleges in ways that concentrate educational opportunity in privileged communities.

The seminar is on Zoom. Join here: https://stanford.zoom.us/my/a0526birthday?pwd=YlBJM014NHl0ZGRBQnAzaE5ZRkt4QT09. 

Title: Performing Social Closure: How College Board Geomarkets Structure Recruiting Visits by Selective Colleges
Abstract: Selective colleges are sites of social closure. Scholarship examines how selective colleges evaluate applicants, but colleges do not passively accept applications. They recruit. If college recruiting territories are structured by shared infrastructures, then mechanisms of social closure operate upstream of admissions. This article examines how College Board Geomarkets and the Market Segment Model structure high school recruiting visits by selective colleges. Geomarkets carve metropolitan areas into smaller geographic units meant to define local recruiting territories. The Market Segment Model predicts how student demand varies by Geomarket as a function of social class. These market devices become embedded in organizational structures and in third-party products that produce college recruiting behavior. We analyze high school recruiting visits made in 2017 by 42 selective colleges to address three research questions. We find that visit patterns are consistent with the Market Segment Model, with visits concentrated in affluent Geomarkets (RQ1); Geomarkets explain substantial variation in which high schools receive visits (RQ2); and the benefits of being located in a popular Geomarket accrue disproportionately to affluent schools and to schools with moderate shares of Black, Hispanic, and Native students (RQ3). The market devices that college admissions offices incorporate constitute a shared infrastructure that performs social closure by matching a socioeconomic hierarchy of communities to a socioeconomic hierarchy of colleges prior to the evaluation of applications. More broadly, our findings suggest that market devices can facilitate infrastructural collusion, whereby shared reliance on third-party classificatory infrastructures produces coordinated behavior without explicit coordination.