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

Robert Fairlie, Florian Hoffmann () and Philip Oreopoulos
Additional contact information
Florian Hoffmann: University of British Columbia, Vancouver

No 5983, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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: college; minorities; education; race (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: American Economic Review, 2014, 104 (8), 2567-2591

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5983.pdf (application/pdf)

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)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5983

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().