For Native Students, a Deepening Divide

The achievement gap between Native American students and their peers starts young, and persists through college. On nearly every measure of student success, from test scores to college completion, Native students have stagnated, and in some cases are falling further behind.

Test Scores

From elementary through high school, Native students are more likely than white students to score “below basic” on the math and reading portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and less likely to score “at or above proficient.”

National On-Time Graduation Rate

Native students — a group that includes American Indians and Alaska Natives — have the lowest on-time graduation rate of any racial subgroup, at 70 percent.

Montana’s On-Time Graduation Rate

In Montana, where 11 percent of students are American Indian, just 65 percent of Native students graduate on time, compared with 88 percent of white students.

Status Dropout Rate

In 2014, more than 11 percent of Native students between the ages of 16 and 24 were not enrolled in college and did not have a high-school diploma — a status dropout rate of 11 percent, nearly double the national average.

College Enrollment

In 2014, only a quarter of Native students between the ages of 18 and 24 were enrolled in a degree-granting postsecondary institution — the lowest rate of any racial subgroup.

College Completion

Native students graduate college at roughly the same rate as black students. Just under a quarter of first-time, full-time students who started at four-year institutions in 2008 graduated on time. Six years in, 41 percent of those Native students had graduated.

College Attainment

Over the past decade, the share of 25- to 29-year olds with bachelor’s degrees or higher increased for all racial and ethnic groups except for American Indians and Alaska Natives. At the same time, the divide between white students and their minority peers deepened — nowhere so sharply as between white students and Native students, where the gap in bachelor’s attainment grew almost 10 percentage points.

That same pattern could be seen for individuals with an associate degree or higher, where the gap between whites and Native Americans grew by 12 percentage points