A Hidden Strength of Minority-Serving Colleges: Meeting Students Where They Are

American Council on Education

It’s a notion at the heart of minority-serving institutions’ missions: They can bump their students up the economic ladder at a rate nearly double or triple that of predominantly white institutions.

And now there’s evidence for that notion, in a finding from a new study released on Tuesday by the American Council on Education. The study pulled from a federal data set and analyzed students’ and parents’ income from a data set maintained by the Equality of Opportunity Project, a group of academics at different institutions who track inequality in America.

In addition to the finding on social mobility, the study found minority-serving institutions often enroll students with the lowest family incomes, including first-generation students. Those institutions spend less on their students than do primarily white institutions, according to a report on the study.

The Chronicle spoke with the report’s lead author, Lorelle Espinosa, assistant vice president in ACE’s Center for Policy Research and Strategy, about why the results might seem counterintuitive and what they mean for those institutions. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Minority-serving institutions — whether historically black colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions, or others — work with students who are often coming from a more challenging background, and do it with less money, but it appears from the paper that they’re also effectively moving their students up the social ladder. What were your thoughts as you came to see that as a pattern?

A. There’s a common misperception that because they’re doing more with less, they’re also “less than” in some way or that they are somehow not serving students at the level of some of the more prestigious institutions. They often get lumped into a group that is just paid less attention to, and so we thought this doesn’t really gel with what we know about these institutions, even anecdotally. We’re not surprised, but we’re excited to show that these institutions are moving students up the economic ladder in ways that some may not expect.

Q. What can we glean from the findings, as far as policy goes or for the colleges themselves?

A. One thing, of course, that we think a lot about is how these institutions are funded and at what level they are funded. They have avenues by which they receive funds from the Department of Education and other agencies. So there are streams, but as we point out, a majority of these institutions are operating at a resource level that is below the average for higher education at large.

When we think about where we want to place investment in the future, we’re making an argument that investment should be placed here. The reason that’s important for the future is because we’re seeing this changing student body. These are the institutions that are serving a larger proportion of low-income students, a larger proportion of first-generation college students, and of course students of color. So thinking about the future of our country, these institutions are serving a need that many people are saying we need to get behind.

But if they’re not adequately funded to serve that need, then how much can we expect? We certainly don’t want to say, “Look, they’re doing so well without resources, so just keep the resources low.” We want to say is: “Look how well they do even when they are resource-strapped, and think about how much more they could do if they had adequate resources.” For the institutions themselves, this is just a great opportunity to share these types of data with their constituencies, and use it to tell their story.

Q. What are these institutions doing right?

A. People like to say that these institutions meet students where they are, and that’s absolutely right. They approach students with an attitude that they want to capitalize on their strength and on the value that they bring to their campuses. These students, in particular, often are seen as having deficits because they don’t have the academic preparation or they don’t have the income or they don’t have the ability to go full time — or anything that puts them in that “at risk” category. And it’s not that the other institutions don’t want their students to succeed because they absolutely do.

Q. If we’re talking about social mobility at elite institutions or primarily white institutions, are we more likely to see students at those institutions at a higher rung on the socioeconomic ladder to begin with, so we wouldn’t see them climbing as much?

A. There is an argument that could be made that minority-serving institutions have higher mobility because they’re starting with students at the lowest economic level. And you’re right. Many of the elite schools are not starting with that. But that is is the wrong point.

Minority-serving institutions are enrolling these students, and they’re doing so with an expectation that they’ll meet those students with whatever they are bringing. If they’re bringing a K-12 education that isn’t college-ready, those institutions have probably the most offerings in terms of developmental education.

Or are they bringing barriers like Pell Grant eligibility or low-income financial barriers? Yes. And these institutions are ready to meet them where they are with different types of aid policies or different types of offerings that can supplement them, say through food banks. Or it could be things like emergency-aid funds or offerings that happen in off hours because the students are also working a lot of the time. They’re meeting their population where they are that is unique to the field.

Q. Does this study also challenge the narrative that, counterintuitively, a college degree isn’t worth much?

A. Oh, absolutely. It highlights the value of a degree for students that are starting in a low economic quintile or coming out of families that are low income. Also many of these students’ parents did not go to college or graduate from college. So for this population in particular, higher education is playing a great role, and should be invested in if we want to see more of our population succeed economically. And of course that gets to the individual benefit. We can’t lose sight of the fact that there is great societal benefit when you move these individuals up the economic ladder.

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

Correction (6/13/2018, 10:25 a.m.): The original version of this article misspelled the interviewee’s last name. It’s Espinosa, not Espinoza. The text and photo caption have been corrected.