A Community College Instructor like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom

Robert Fairlie, Florian Hoffmann and Philip Oreopoulos

CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both student and classroom fixed effects and focus on those with limited course enrolment options. We also compare sensitivity in the results from using within versus across section instructor type variation. Given the computational complexity of the 2-way fixed effects model with a large set of fixed effects we rely on numerical algorithms that exploit the particular structure of the model’s normal equations. We find that the performance gap in terms of class dropout and pass rates between white and minority students falls by roughly half when taught by a minority instructor. In models that allow for a full set of ethnic and racial interactions between students and instructors, we find African-American students perform particularly better when taught by African-American instructors.

Keywords: Higher Education; Student Outcomes and Skills; Teacher and Student Interactions; Economics of Minorities and Races; Discrimination; 2-way Fixed Effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I23 J24 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2011-10-27, Revised 2011-10-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: A Community College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom (2014)
Working Paper: A community college instructor like me: Race and ethnicity interactions in the classroom (2014)
Working Paper: A Community College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom (2011)
Working Paper: A Community College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ubc:clssrn:clsrn_admin-2011-27

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