Abstract
Although numerous studies have examined racial/ethnic inequalities in collegiate student outcomes, serious attention to disparities in post-secondary student learning has emerged only recently. Using a national sample of 35,000 college seniors and 250 diverse institutions from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, this study investigates the role of institutional characteristics in promoting the development of higher-order cognitive skills and the equitable distribution of these skills by student racial/ethnic background. Using three-level hierarchical linear models within an analysis of covariance framework, we find that the initial academic gaps that separate African American students from their white peers widen even further during college. Although substantial academic disparities exist between Hispanic and white students at both college entry and exit, Hispanic and white students gain academic skills at statistically comparable rates. Importantly, racial/ethnic differences in cognitive development vary across institutions partly as a function of institutional characteristics. In particular, even after accounting for a host of student- and institution-level characteristics, African American/white and Hispanic/white inequalities are somewhat smaller at colleges that enroll larger proportions of non-white students. However, these benefits of increased minority enrollments are contingent upon the academic backgrounds of students’ peers, with academically weaker student enrollments in some cases negating the benefits of increased racial/ethnic diversity.
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Notes
The percentage of institutions in the sample that are baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral level, are 35, 40, and 24, respectively, which mirrors the corresponding Carnegie Classifications across institutions nationwide, at 30, 41, and 27%, respectively. Thirteen percent of sample institutions are minority-serving institutions, as compared with 12% of institutions in the Carnegie Classification 2006 national dataset. The average percentage of full-time students in our sample is 81 compared to a national average of 86%. Moreover, the geographic distribution of our sample reflects the Nation’s (e.g., 14% of colleges in our sample and 12% of all colleges are located in the far west). Sample institutions are somewhat more likely to be public and not unexpectedly, have larger undergraduate student populations, on average.
The Test Validity Study (2009) provides further evidence of the CLA’s reliability, sensitivity to growth, and construct validity (Klein et al. 2009). The CLA’s psychometric properties have also been examined by a technical panel convened by the Voluntary System of Accountability, which approved the CLA for use as a learning outcomes measure for its College Portrait project. More recently, the CLA was evaluated by reviewers for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which selected the CLA as the generic skills assessment for its Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project.
Clearly, disparities in cognitive development among Asian and other race/ethnicity students are an equally important concern. However, due to their smaller representation within the sample, our multilevel models could not support slopes-as-outcomes analyses of these racial/ethnic subgroups.
Unfortunately, the longitudinal sample is too small to support a slopes-as-outcomes multilevel approach. The longitudinal sample spans only 37 institutions (as compared to the 245 institutions in this study). Ten of the institutions in this smaller sample have within-school samples of fewer than 25 students and only five institutions have samples of more than ten African American students.
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Kugelmass, H., Ready, D.D. Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Collegiate Cognitive Gains: A Multilevel Analysis of Institutional Influences on Learning and its Equitable Distribution. Res High Educ 52, 323–348 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-010-9200-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-010-9200-5