Patterson, Michelle. THE IMPACT OF COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ON THE EDUCATIONAL ASPIRATIONS OF WOMEN. FINAL REPORT. California Univ., Santa Barbara. Dept. of Sociology. Dec 1976. 56 p. (ED136645)

The project was designed to examine the way in which institutions of higher education change, or fail to change, the educational aspirations of women students and to test the explanatory power of two dominant sociological reference group theories, environmental press and relative deprivation, when applied separately to male and female undergraduates. The analyses were carried out on existing longitudinal data files developed by the American Council on Education's Cooperative Institutional Research Program. The file used consisted of 1966 freshmen who were followed up as sophomores (1967) and seniors (1970). Variations in the aspirations of men and women were found after one year of college, but these differences appear to wash-out after four years in college. The significant predictors of senior year academic self-concept are the same for men and women. The three most important predictors of senior year educational aspiration are also the same. For both men and women both relative deprivation and environmental press appear to be operating in influencing senior year educational aspirations. The relative deprivation effect is a strong one but, contrary to the theory, appears to operate directly through college grades and not through the intermediate psychological variable of academic self-concept. College selectivity is shown to have a significant and positive effect on educational aspirations, although this effect is noticeably stronger for men than for women. (JMF)