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Explaining the Achievement Gap
A new working paper released by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute by recent Cornell graduate Marquise McGraw explores a subject that has long been a concern in academia – what factors can help to explain differing academic performance (broadly measured by both propensity to graduate and cumulative GPAs) amongst students of different ethnicities and backgrounds? The findings, while still preliminary and subject to improvements in both the model and the data, are intriguing. Through the use of econometric models, McGraw is able to discern the marginal impact that any individual attribute may have on a student’s academic performance after controlling for all other possible explanations. For instance, McGraw’s results show what the marginal impact public or private high school attendance is estimated to be on a student’s cumulative GPA after controlling for such things as an individual’s race or what course of study the student is in. His paper controls for a wide array of variables—including such interesting characteristics as whether or not a student is on financial aid, a legacy student, whether or not the student went to a public or a private high school, and each student’s high school’s size and its expenditures per pupil. There is a lot to good information to digest in the paper, and what follows is a brief overview of what I find to be McGraw’s key findings: 1) An individual’s SAT scores are an important predictor of both graduation rates and cumulative GPA – but only if that person is white. Such evidence supports the claim that the SAT is not as good of a marker of academic success that its proponents would like to claim it is. From a university policy perspective, I find #7 to be the most interesting. Namely, it suggests that universities can do more to expand/target their outreach practices to non-black students who may need additional help outside of the lecture hall. Coincidentally, the paper relies on a restricted dataset of a certain nameless, large Ivy-league university. See if you can figure out what university McGraw’s study looks at… N.B. I have recently extended an invitation to McGraw to join the MetaEzra blogging team… here’s to hoping that he will soon be on this site offering some of his own sage insights about Cornell on a semi-periodic basis. Matthew Nagowski | Posted on June 10, 2006 (#) |
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