Socioeconomic Status and College Student Academic Performance

Introduction and Background

Access to education over the past three decades has become far more prevalent than in the earlier years of the 20th century. While the proportion of children with limited access to education remains high in developing countries, governments and international organizations—including UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, and the World Bank—have made initiatives to expand access to educational resources such as schools and learning materials. Education is widely regarded as the primary pathway to upward social mobility among people from low-income and middle-income families (Özdemir et al., 2014). Accordingly, governments across the globe have taken steps to make education accessible freely or at affordable prices at the primary, intermediate, and tertiary levels (Breen, 2019). Education is also recognized as a fundamental human right, reinforcing the obligation of governments to make it available.

However, provision and access to education represent only one dimension of the broader educational picture. Academic performance depends on a range of additional factors, including the quality of education, the caliber of teachers, political stability, and access to learning materials. For the purposes of this research, these factors are treated as constants, and the focus is placed on the impact a student's background has on their performance. Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to the social standing and income of a student's family (Xuan et al., 2019). Assuming that the quality of education delivered is standard, a student's socioeconomic factors emerge as a central variable that could influence academic performance.

This study focuses on the performance of college students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. To gain admission to a college of education, students must have demonstrated foundational learning capabilities—such as vocabulary, phonological awareness, and oral language—at earlier educational levels. At lower educational levels, such as kindergarten and intermediate school, reading competency is correlated with home literacy environments, parental stress, and access to books (Li et al., 2020). At the tertiary level, however, these home-based factors carry less direct influence, since the academic content falls outside the area of expertise most parents can offer. College students are instead expected to draw on the resources available to them—instructors, libraries, internet resources, and peers—to build knowledge in areas they find challenging.

College students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to qualify for financial aid resources that ease daily life at college than some of their higher-SES peers. However, research by Diemer and Ali (2009) indicates that students from low-SES families face ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers that can impede their vocational development (You & Yoon, 2014). The successful performance of college students can be better understood through the lens of social cognitive career theory, which is composed of self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and goals. These three components can be expanded or constrained by environmental factors—such as career barriers—that affect a student's progress. As Jeon (2019) notes, career self-efficacy involves "the self-evaluation of one's abilities to participate in career development tasks and to make career decisions." Consequently, students' performance at college depends considerably on their self-efficacy, not solely on their socioeconomic background.

The existing literature relies primarily on qualitative measures to determine whether students' socioeconomic characteristics affect their performance. These studies examine parents' level of education in relation to their income and SES, finding that parents with lower educational attainment tend to have lower socioeconomic status (Li et al., 2020; Xuan et al., 2019; Özdemir et al., 2014). Moreover, most existing studies focus on preliminary rather than tertiary levels of education—contexts in which parents can more directly guide their children's academic progress. College-level education, by contrast, depends to a much greater extent on the individual student's agency.

The research also suggests that while socioeconomic factors do affect student performance, existing studies frequently fail to account for the interventions that have been introduced at the tertiary level to offset the disadvantages associated with low SES. As a result, there is a notable research gap in the recent literature regarding the effect of socioeconomic factors on college students' performance in light of these newer institutional supports (Breen, 2019). The sections that follow outline the theories and frameworks that inform arguments about the relationship between socioeconomic status and student academic outcomes.

Elements of Socioeconomic Status

Socioeconomic status refers to an individual's position within a society's wealth and social hierarchy. This dimension is often closely linked to a student's parents' level of education, which in turn shapes the type of employment opportunities available to them. Children raised in single-parent households—whether due to divorce or the death of a parent—face a heightened risk of dropping out of school before reaching college (Jeon, 2019). Those who do attain access to college education often encounter financial barriers that make it difficult to sustain their studies. Efforts to mitigate the effects of low SES on performance have included the creation of financial lending schemes and grant programs designed to help students access the resources they need to finance their education.

Gobena (2018) argues that access to academic resources is limited for children from low-SES backgrounds, placing them at a disadvantage compared to peers who can readily access public libraries, school libraries, and bookstores. Many such students also live in rural or economically disenfranchised communities where existing facilities are scarce and difficult to reach, further compounding their disadvantage.

Historically, parental income was a primary determinant of the social and economic resources a child could access, and by extension, their academic performance. The challenges that students from disadvantaged communities face extend beyond the college campus and into their home environments. A lack of supportive family circumstances during a child's formative years can contribute to downward social mobility (Breen, 2019). Students who lack a nurturing home environment, stable family structure, and quality early-childhood care are less likely to develop strong self-efficacy and to cultivate and sustain career ambitions (Müller & Pollak, 2015; Billingsley, 2019). Conversely, students from high-SES families benefit from social connectivity; their families help build supportive networks from an early age that foster career ambitions and guard against downward mobility.