Background: Most community college students from low-income families have ambitious educational degree goals, but only a small fraction attains them. For many decades, sociologists have primarily attributed this problem to a cooling out process in which college practitioners diminish students’ educational ambitions using academic reorientation processes that encourage the least-promising students to lower their degree goals. The cooling out explanation focuses exclusively on the actions of institutional community college actors rather than other factors affecting student decisions and thus has been used to vilify community colleges as engines of inequality. Objective: This article addresses an alternative hypothesis, considering whether student financial aid, the ubiquitous and multifaceted system that community college actors mainly do not control, influences students’ educational goals. Method and Results: Using data from an experimental study of need-based financial aid in Wisconsin, I find that a private grant program, which triggered a repackaging of students’ financial aid awards, decreased the educational degree aspirations and expectations of 2-year college students, on average. Contributions and Implications: Although counterintuitive, this finding is consistent with the idea that the complex manner in which aid is delivered creates confusion and uncertainty about the actual costs of college. While these lowered degree goals persisted over time, they did not affect degree attainment rates, suggesting students’ expectations may be more malleable and less consequential than prior research suggests. This article demonstrates that the observed cooling out phenomenon is not necessarily the result of a meritocratic sorting system and involves processes previously neglected by sociological theory. A more robust model of college choices is needed.

中文翻译：

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重新思考 21 世纪的降温假说：经济援助对学生教育目标的影响

背景：大多数来自低收入家庭的社区大学生都有雄心勃勃的教育学位目标，但只有一小部分人实现了这些目标。几十年来，社会学家主要将这个问题归因于一个冷却过程，在这个过程中，大学从业者使用学术重新定位过程来削弱学生的教育抱负，鼓励最没有前途的学生降低他们的学位目标。冷却解释只关注机构社区大学参与者的行为，而不是影响学生决定的其他因素，因此被用来诋毁社区大学作为不平等的引擎。目标：本文提出了一个替代假设，考虑学生经济援助，社区大学行动者主要无法控制的无处不在和多方面的系统影响着学生的教育目标。方法和结果：使用来自威斯康星州基于需求的经济援助的实验研究数据，我发现私人赠款计划引发了学生经济援助奖励的重新包装，降低了 2 年制大学的教育学位愿望和期望学生，平均。贡献和影响：虽然违反直觉，但这一发现与以下观点一致，即提供援助的复杂方式会导致对大学实际成本的混淆和不确定性。虽然这些降低的学位目标会随着时间的推移而持续存在，但它们并没有影响学位获得率，表明学生的期望可能比之前的研究表明的更具延展性和更少的影响。本文表明，观察到的降温现象不一定是精英分类系统的结果，而是涉及以前被社会学理论忽视的过程。需要一个更稳健的大学选择模型。