| Tatiana Melguizo
Stanford University
What types of institutions are doing a better job graduating minorities? A comparative analysis for African American, Hispanic, and white students in the U.S. in the last two decades
FINAL REPORT:
This study uses a standard economic analysis to explain differences in college completion for African American, Hispanic, Asian and white students in the U.S during the 1980s and the 1990s. The analysis accounts for the impact of individual and institutional characteristics on student college completion. It corrects for omitted variables for the students and institutions by using proxies for student motivation and estimations using instrumental variables and fixed effects. Pooled cross-cohort analysis is used to test the impact of individual and institutional factors over time, and simulation analysis is used to identify how responsive are minorities to equalizing resources and pay-off of white students. The data are a sample of the 1982 and 1992 senior year students from the High School and Beyond (HS&B/So) and the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:0P).
The most important variable explaining college completion is whether a high school graduate first attends a four-year college. Students who first attended a four-year college rather than first attending a two-year college and transferring into a four-year college had higher odds of completion after controlling for individual characteristics and correcting for self-selection and omitted variable problems. Two-year colleges appeared to divert students, especially minorities, from the four-year track and diminished their chances of completing a bachelorÕs degree. However, issues of self-selection into a four-year institution still may have biased the coefficients of initial four year college attendance.
Despite an overall increase in college completion in the 1990s compared to the 1980s, minority rates continue to lag behind those of white and Asians. The results suggested that relatively lower socioeconomic status, academic preparation, and educational expectations of minorities are responsible for the persistence of the gap in completion rates. Individual resources also affected completion through their impact on the choice of institution attended. By contrast, the college completion rates of white and Asian students benefited not only from rigorous academic preparation, but also because they were more likely to first attend a research and highly competitive tertiary institutions, where completion rates are higher. The previous results suggest that the achievements of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, those of Hispanics, were overshadowed by the success of Asians, therefore perpetuating the college completion gap.
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