Although many scholars have written about culture in schools and discuss culture as a group-level phenomenon, quantitative studies tend to empirically examine culture at the individual-level. This study presents a group-level conceptualization of academic culture known as cultural heterogeneity—the presence of a diverse array of competing and conflicting cultural models—to examine whether variation in school-level academic orientation predicts college enrollment. We use the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS) to show that whereas academic press (or average school academic culture) is positively related to enrollment, variation in school academic culture is associated with declines in enrollment. These findings hold net of students’ own academic behaviors and beliefs, background factors, and school characteristics. Thus, exposure to conflicting models of culture can lead youth to make decisions that do not reflect broader societal goals. This study addresses the misalignment between the conceptual and empirical definitions of culture in education by examining the link between school academic culture measured as a group-level process, which is consistent with how scholars discuss culture, and college enrollment.

尽管许多学者已经撰写了关于学校文化的文章，并将文化作为一种​​群体层面的现象进行讨论，但定量研究倾向于在个人层面上实证检验文化。本研究提出了一种群体层面的学术文化概念，即文化异质性，即存在多种竞争和冲突的文化模式，以检验学校层面学术取向的变化是否可以预测大学入学率。我们使用 2002 年教育纵向研究 (ELS) 表明，虽然学术压力（或平均学校学术文化）与入学率呈正相关，但学校学术文化的变化与入学率下降相关。这些调查结果考虑了学生自身的学术行为和信念、背景因素和学校特征。因此，接触相互冲突的文化模式可能会导致年轻人做出不反映更广泛社会目标的决定。本研究通过考察作为群体层面过程衡量的学校学术文化之间的联系，解决了教育中文化的概念和实证定义之间的不一致问题，这与学者讨论文化和大学入学的方式一致。