Abstract
Although higher education research has identified racial/ethnic disparities in college enrollment and degree completion, few studies investigate the educational outcomes of multiracial students relative to monoracial student groups. This paper begins to fill this gap and aims to open a conversation about the precarious state of data collection and empirical research on the growing multiracial population. Using several waves from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), we center multiracial college students in our empirical analysis, which investigates the following questions: (1) how do enrollment rates and patterns of enrollment based on institutional type differ, if at all, for multiracial college students relative to monoracial college students? and (2) how does retention and overall degree attainment differ between multiracial and monoracial groups of college students? Our analyses identify several trends that suggest that multiracial people enroll in college at significantly lower rates, are more likely to enroll in private colleges and universities and four-year institutions, and are less likely to earn bachelor’s degrees relative to other racial groups.
Highlights
It is well established that a college education positively influences mobility prospects and generates significant social and economic returns for college graduates
Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) offer educational spaces where whiteness is not centered in campus culture, yet these institutions may not offer the same privileges that we argue are associated with proximity to whiteness
Many Black-white students in this sample indicated that prior to attending their Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), they would have self-identified as biracial, but later began to self-identify as Black. While this identity shift is characterized as a positive one by these respondents, reflecting feelings of inclusion around monoracial Black peers and a sense of belonging to the Black community, it is worth noting that these results suggest that multiracial students at both HBCUs and predominantly white institutions (PWIs) may face having their multiracial identities de-emphasized or denied, albeit in distinct ways
Summary
It is well established that a college education positively influences mobility prospects and generates significant social and economic returns for college graduates (see Hout 2012 for a review). While rates of college enrollment have been approaching parity in recent decades (Adelman 2006), disparities in degree attainment persist: 64% of white students complete a bachelor’s degree within six years of matriculation compared to only 40% of Black students, 54% of Hispanic students, and 39% of Native American students (U.S Department of Education 2017). These trends suggest that while college access for nonwhite populations has improved, there are persistent systemic barriers in higher education that work to reinforce and reproduce existing race-based inequalities. Adjusting for multiracial people in research about race requires both experimental design choices (e.g., how to define race and how to ask about race) and analytic questions (e.g., how to split racial categories for analysis, whether to include multiracial people in one or more categories, and whether to separate out multiracial people) (Bratter 2018; Campbell et al 2016)
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