STEMming Opportunity: How High-School Majors Preserve Sorting and Educational Stratification

Purpose--Texas House Bill 5 (2013) introduced the Foundation High School Program, requiring students to select an endorsement—a curricular concentration similar to a major. Although intended to expand flexibility and align coursework with college and workforce pathways, the STEM endorsement may function as a new form of tracking. Guided by Oakes and colleagues’ work on tracking and detracking and by Domina et al.’s application of categorical inequality theory to education, this study examines which students complete a STEM endorsement and how this choice shapes college enrollment outcomes. Research Methods--We combine a content analysis of Texas college-admissions requirements with administrative data from the Houston Independent School District. Logistic and multinomial models estimate predictors of STEM endorsement completion and college choice, and nonlinear variance decomposition analyses assess how STEM–non-STEM differences in college enrollment are explained by background characteristics. Findings--The STEM endorsement aligns closely with selective college admissions. Academic factors strongly predict STEM completion, and while the endorsement is associated with enrollment at selective colleges, this relationship is largely explained by prior academic achievement. High-achieving students are more likely to pursue the STEM endorsement, which accounts for its link to selective college enrollment. Implications--The STEM endorsement operates less as a pathway for broadening opportunity and more as a marker of academic prestige. As a surface-level policy reform, the endorsement system reconstitutes familiar tracking dynamics under a new label, reinforcing educational stratification by privileging students with stronger preparation.