Talk with Lincoln Quillian of Northwestern University
| When |
Nov 19, 2025
from 12:00 PM to 01:00 PM |
|---|---|
| Where | Art-Sociology Building Room 4103 |
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Abstract
Many students' college search process starts with an online search. Search results, however, are not the same for all searchers; they are personalized based on location and other digital trace data. We examine how the characteristics of the zip code from which a search originates affect search results for college information. We scrape Google search results for “colleges,” setting browser parameters to indicate the searches originated from zip codes we specified. We submitting searches covering all zip codes in the continental United States with populations over 100 persons (N=59,937). We find that a Zip code's income level is an important predictor of the type of school that appears in outcomes. Searches originating in low-income zip codes yield results including colleges with, on average, lower completion rates, lower post-graduate earnings, and higher post-graduation default rates than searches in more affluent zip codes. We discuss mechanisms that account for these patterns across both organic and sponsored search results. The characteristics of nearby colleges are a key driver of inequality in the organic results; for sponsored results, there is evidence of targeting low-income zip codes by for-profit and online colleges. We discuss the implications of differential search results for inequality in college outcomes.
Bio
Lincoln Quillian is the Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision-Making at Northwestern University, the chair of the Department of Sociology, and a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. His work focuses on social stratification, race and ethnicity, urban sociology, and quantitative research methods. Recently, he has published on how multiple forms of segregation combine to produce neighborhood poverty concentration and on understanding racial discrimination in hiring through meta-analysis of field experiments. These projects have appeared as publications in a number of journals in sociology, demography, and social psychology.