Race and College Success: Evidence from Missouri

Cory Koedel and Peter Arcidiacono

No 1212, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri

Abstract: Conditional on enrollment, African American entrants at 4-year public universities are much less likely to graduate, and graduate in STEM fields, than white entrants. Using administrative micro data from Missouri, we show that the success gaps between African-American and white students in college can be explained by three factors: (1) racial differences in how students sort to universities and majors, (2) racial differences in high-school quality prior to entry, and (3) racial differences in other observed pre-entry skills. We decompose the success gaps between African Americans and whites to identify the relative importance of these three factors. Even holding racial differences in high-school quality and pre-entry skills fixed, we find that a non-negligible fraction of the racial gap in graduation rates can be explained by differences in student sorting across universities and majors (10 to 20 percent). Differences in observed measures of pre-entry skills – primarily students’ high-school class rankings conditional on high school of attendance – are consistently the most important determinants of the success gaps by race. Differences in pre-entry skills explain a larger share of the graduation gap for men than for women, and most of the racial gaps in STEM attainment (conditional on STEM entry) for both genders

Keywords: black-white achievement gap; black-white graduation gap; black-white college gap; racial college gap; racial achievement gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pgs.
Date: 2012-09-25, Revised 2013-07-15
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kmR4LGy61s6kQdfQY ... wu0/view?usp=sharing (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Race and College Success: Evidence from Missouri (2014)
Working Paper: Race and College Success: Evidence from Missouri (2013)
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:umc:wpaper:1212

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chao Gu ().