TAs Like Me: Racial Interactions between Graduate Teaching Assistants and Undergraduates

Lester Lusher, Douglas Campbell and Scott Carrell

No 21568, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Over the past 40 years, higher education institutions in the U.S. have experienced a dramatic shift in the racial composition of students enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Using administrative data from a large, diverse university in California, we identify the extent to which the academic outcomes of undergraduates are affected by the race/ethnicity of their graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). To overcome selection issues in course taking, we exploit the timing of TA assignments, which occur after students enroll in a course, and we estimate models with both class and student fixed effects. Results show a positive and significant increase in course grades when students are assigned TAs of a similar race/ethnicity. These effects are largest in classes where TAs are given advanced copies of exams and when exams had no multiple choice questions. We also find that assignment to similar race TAs positively affect both section and office hour attendance, suggesting that TA-student match quality and role model effects are the primary drivers of the results.

JEL-codes: I2 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: ED LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as Lester Lusher & Doug Campbell & Scott Carrell, 2018. "TAs like me: Racial interactions between graduate teaching assistants and undergraduates," Journal of Public Economics, vol 159, pages 203-224.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21568.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: TAs like me: Racial interactions between graduate teaching assistants and undergraduates (2018)
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:nbr:nberwo:21568

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21568

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().