How do political, environmental, and institutional contexts affect African American and Latino undergraduate student success at U.S. universities? Despite a bulk of work on minority student access to higher education, much less is known about minority student success. Some scholars have conducted studies of specific interventions, but there is very little work on how political contexts and university policies affect the educational attainment of its students. This William T. Grant Scholar award will allow Hicklin to: (1) conduct a quantitative analysis of how state- and university-level factors affect minority student success; (2) investigate the unintended consequences of significant shifts in higher education policies on minority student success; (3) examine how administrative management and programs affect minority student success; and (4) better inform state and university policymaking. The quantitative data will be drawn primarily from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, supplemented by primary data collection of state policies. The survey data will be compiled from surveys of state higher education organizations and university presidents. The qualitative data will come from case studies of state bureaucratic agencies and individual institutions. Analyses will pair these three data sources to investigate how policies directly affect minority student success and indirectly affect success through their impact on institutional programs and managerial practices. The study will mostly focus on African American and Latino undergraduate students enrolled at four-year institutions in the U.S.
How do political, environmental, and institutional contexts affect African American and Latino undergraduate student success at U.S. universities?
