The Persistence of Black College Students

Sociologists Christina Ciocca Eller and Thomas A. DiPrete of Columbia University analyzed data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System—both collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)—to assess the sources of this racial gap in college-completion rates. Their sample included 8,980 students, 82.5 percent (7,410 students) of whom identified as white and 17.5 percent (1,570 students) as black. Of those who entered four-year colleges, approximately 75 percent of white students and 50 percent of black students completed a bachelor’s degree—a 25 percent discrepancy—in the study’s time frame.

The researchers found that what underlies this gap is a more complicated dynamic they call “paradoxical persistence”: Black students attend college at greater rates than expected, given their socioeconomic disadvantages, and thereby attain more degrees than expected. So the completion gap is belied by other factors.

“The paradoxically high rate of four-year-college entry among black students has the dual effect of expanding black students’ relative disadvantage with respect to [bachelor’s degree] completion while lessening their disadvantage with respect to BA attainment, or the rate of BA completion among all high school graduates,” the researchers write.

Their analysis showed that lower levels of academic and financial resources on the part of the black students cause most of the disparity in graduation rates. These resources include or are measured by parental education, family income, the relative rigor of their high school education, and high school GPA. The researchers found that black students tend to enroll in four-year colleges at higher rates than white students with similar demographic characteristics, due in part to affirmative-action policies that pull in more black students.

The largest contributing factor to the disparity in graduation rates is the difference in precollege academic preparation, with black students clustered in high schools that are not as rigorous. Even if they have a strong GPA, they may not have achieved those top grades in classes that are academically challenging, placing them at a disadvantage when they reach college and compete directly against white students who had better preparation in high school, Ciocca Eller says.

Policymakers often think of higher education as a socioeconomic equalizer that can boost students’ mobility in the adult world, no matter where they started as children. The paper confirms that, especially for black students, this may be true in many cases and that students’ precollege circumstances may not seal their destiny.

For black students, the data show that the distribution of their outcomes is wider than that of white students. This indicates that what happens to white students before college makes a bigger impact on them than it does on black students, giving college the opportunity to affect black students’ trajectories in a bigger way, Ciocca Eller says. “There’s this huge opportunity in the college context to change students’ courses.”

What the paper contributes to the field, she says, is the insight that the well-known resource gulf between black and white high school students isn’t the only dynamic at play when students enroll in college.

“There’s also a decision aspect to the black-white gap in BA completion,” she says. Black students are more proactive in enrolling in college and have equal or higher educational expectations than their white peers, and propel themselves through graduation. That gives them more of an active role rather than simply a passive role in their higher-education outcomes. They have a greater willingness, according to the authors, to make “mobility-enhancing decisions,” which boost overall degree attainment and the benefits that come from it.

“Their agency is a very important contributor to why there’s a lower attainment gap,” she says.

Another of the study’s main contributions, says University of California, Riverside, sociologist Steven Brint, is that it refutes earlier work that paints students as disadvantaged permanently by their families’ lack of resources and by educational institutions that don’t serve them well. But this paper shows that background does not have to be fate.

“Some of the difference in family resources can be made up by the effective realization of a culture of aspirations and universities helping students to realize their aspirations,” Brint says.

The overarching solution to racial disparities in graduation rates is “greater equality in socioeconomic resources and social status,” he says. But until that happens, this study points to hopeful signs.

“There are these mitigating cultural influences that lead to some optimism about the gaps being reduced over time,” Brint says. 

Christina Ciocca Eller and Thomas A. DiPrete, “The Paradox of Persistence: Explaining the Black-White Gap in Bachelor’s Degree Completion,” American Sociological Review, vol. 83, no. 6, 2018.

Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.