Getting across the finish line: how to boost completion rates for underrepresented student groups

ABSTRACT

There remains a gap in college completion rates for Black and Hispanic students. Universities have focused on creating a diverse student body (peer effects), a diverse faculty (role model effects) and on providing resources to boost completion rates. This paper tests these effects in a panel data set of 9800 observations from 1493 universities over 2011–2018. Regression results show peer effects disappear when role model effects are included suggesting that previous literature testing only peer effects could be suffering from omitted variable bias. Faculty salaries and the percentage of full-time faculty are also highly significant in helping close the gap.

KEYWORDS:

• Black
• Hispanic
• college
• graduation
• completion

JEL:

• I23
• I24
• J15

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 As a robustness check, we also tested adjacent years of peer data through leads and lags. Results were robust.

2 Fixed effects are chosen over random effects based on the results of a Hausman test which suggests random effects could be biased.