Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student bodies; however, the higher education system is highly stratified. In this paper, we seek to understand stratification in the wake of the Great Recession by examining enrollment among students from differing income backgrounds by institutional type. Two theoretical frameworks suggest different conclusions. A Disaster Capitalism framework suggests that in places where the recession was most severe, enrollment by income would become more stratified than in places where the downturn was less severe. In contrast, Effectively Maintained Inequality would suggest that enrollments were already effectively stratified by income and would not necessarily be sensitive to exposure to an economic shock. Employing fixed effects modeling and novel data based on the tax records of 30 million Americans, we examine income composition by institutional type from 2004 to 2012. We find that although stratification by institutional type worsened during the recession and subsequent recovery, patterns of economic stratification were not more intense for institutions that enrolled students from states hardest hit by the recession. We conclude that these patterns are consistent with an Effectively Maintained Inequality framework. During the recession, the top quintiles continued to enjoy their longstanding disproportionate enrollment in the most selective institutions. For the bottom quintiles, the longstanding marginalization from 4-year college going persisted through the recession. These stratification patterns, however, were not more pronounced in places hardest hit by the recession.

大多数美国大学都明确承诺教育经济多元化的学生群体；然而，高等教育系统是高度分层的。在本文中，我们试图通过按机构类型检查来自不同收入背景的学生的入学率来了解大萧条之后的分层。两个理论框架提出了不同的结论。灾难资本主义框架表明，在经济衰退最严重的地方，按收入计算的入学率将变得更高与经济衰退不太严重的地方相比，分层。相比之下，有效维持的不平等表明入学人数已经按收入有效分层，不一定对经济冲击敏感。我们采用基于 3000 万美国人税收记录的固定效应模型和新数据，研究了 2004 年至 2012 年按制度类型划分的收入构成。我们发现，尽管在衰退和随后的复苏期间按制度类型划分的分层情况恶化，但经济分层模式不是对于那些招收来自受经济衰退打击最严重的州的学生的机构来说，这种情况更为激烈。我们得出结论，这些模式与有效维护的不平等框架是一致的。在经济衰退期间，前五分之一的人继续享受他们在最挑剔的机构中长期不成比例的入学率。对于最底层的五分之一人群来说，四年制大学的长期边缘化在经济衰退中持续存在。然而，这些分层模式在受经济衰退打击最严重的地方并不更加明显。