Although a new study has found that underrepresented community college students fare better when placed in classrooms with an instructor of their ethnic background, diversity leaders warn that the study is too limited in scope to draw any solid conclusions.
“Interesting” was the furthest that two diversity experts would go in describing the study, titled “A Community College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom.” The study was conducted by three economics professors affiliated with the Cambridge, Mass.-based National Bureau of Economic Research.
Using administrative data described as “detailed demographic information on instructors as well as students from one of the largest and most ethnically diverse community colleges in the United States, this study is the first to test whether minority instructors have a positive effect on the academic achievement of minority students at the college level,” the study states.
“We find that the minority achievement gap is smaller in classes taken with underrepresented minority instructors with respect to various course outcomes,” wrote the researchers, economics professors Robert Fairlie, of the University of California, Santa Cruz; Florian Hoffmann, of the University of British Columbia; and Philip Oreopoulos, of the University of Toronto.
While minority students are generally more likely to drop a course, less likely to pass a course, and less likely to earn a B-grade or better, these gaps decrease by 2.9 percentage points, 2.8 percentage points, and 3.2 percentage points, respectively, when minority students are assigned to an instructor of similar minority type, the study states.
“These effects are large,” the study says, “representing roughly half of the total gaps in the outcomes between non-minority and minority students in our data.”
Black students particularly benefit from being taught by Black instructors, the study found, but not necessarily because of anything the instructors are doing pedagogically.
