Advancing a Framework of Racialized Administrative Burdens in Higher Education Policy

ABSTRACT

Many policies in higher education are intended to improve college access and degree completion, yet often those policies fall short of their aims by making it difficult for prospective or current college students to access benefits for which they are eligible. Barriers that inhibit access to policy benefits, such as cumbersome paperwork, can weigh more heavily on members of marginalized communities, including racially minoritized students. Such administrative burdens can thus reinforce patterns of inequity. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for examining administrative burdens embedded in higher education policies that can negatively affect prospective and current college students, especially those who are racially minoritized. With the use of our proposed framework for addressing racialized administrative burdens, researchers can improve the understanding of ethnoracial disparities in higher education, inform policymakers’ design of racially equitable policies for higher education, and enable practitioners to implement those policies to promote racial equity.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational policy
• college students
• policy design
• policy implementation
• racial equity
• administrative burdens
• racialized organizations

Acknowledgments

We thank the William T. Grant Foundation for supporting this work through a Scholars Award (Grant ID #201035). This research was also supported by Project Grant P2CHD042849 awarded for the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use ethnoraciality to refer to the interactions and ethnic structures that shape the lived experiences of social groups. This stands in contrast to more narrow understandings of racial and ethnic relations as unrelated to each other. Moreover, ethnoraciality requires greater awareness of a group’s self-identification along with ways in which its members may distinguish themselves from other social groups within processes of racialization (Warren, 2020).

2. We use the term racially minoritized to acknowledge that minoritization is a social process shaped by power, where ethnoracialized communities are actively minoritized by others rather than naturally existing as a minority (Benitez, 2010). In referencing racially minoritized communities, we reject essentialist views of social groups as sharing an underlying, inherent, similar nature in immutable ways (Medin & Ortony, 1989).

3. Within each of these racialized categories, there is large variation that we are unable to explore in this paper.

4. While policy outcomes can include diverse effects across various domains such as social, economic, and cultural spheres, this paper focuses on the impacts of policies on student outcomes.

5. The policy design process is also known as “formal policy design,” which is distinguished from “informal policy design,” or policy implementation in the administrative burden literature (Baekgaard & Tankink, 2022, p. 17).

6. Through locally embedded schools, tribal governments seek to directly serve Indigenous youth. Tribal organizations, like the National Congress of American Indians (2015), aim to strengthen tribal control of education, preserve and revitalize Native languages, provide tribes with access to tribal member student records, and encourage tribal and state partnerships.

7. We draw from Freire’s (2000) notion of conscientização to refer to a subject’s awareness of oppression, which can motivate praxis through agency. In the context of this study, an agent’s critical consciousness entails a critical understanding of historically oppressive structures and the policies positioned within.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin [P2CHD042849]; William T. Grant Foundation [Grant ID #201035].