> Skip to content
FEATURED:
  • The Evolution of Race in Admissions
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
ADVERTISEMENT
Advice
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Show more sharing options
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Copy Link URLCopied!
  • Print

We Know What Works to Close the Completion Gap

By  David Gooblar
February 20, 2020
Vitae-Graduation Rates Caps
Getty Images

Lately, when I think about the persistent gap in graduation rates by race and ethnicity, I’m reminded of the opening line from a recent book on an equally intractable topic: “Nearly everything we understand about global warming,” writes Nathaniel Rich in Losing Earth, “was understood in 1979.”

The same could be said of one of the most persistent and damning problems facing higher education in the United States: the gap in college completion between white undergraduates and their fellow students from underrepresented minority groups. Six-year graduation rates for white students at American colleges and universities are still nearly 30 percentage points higher than for black students, and nearly 20 points higher than for Hispanic students. Those numbers should outrage anyone with an interest in American higher education.

We’re sorry. Something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net.

Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com

Lately, when I think about the persistent gap in graduation rates by race and ethnicity, I’m reminded of the opening line from a recent book on an equally intractable topic: “Nearly everything we understand about global warming,” writes Nathaniel Rich in Losing Earth, “was understood in 1979.”

The same could be said of one of the most persistent and damning problems facing higher education in the United States: the gap in college completion between white undergraduates and their fellow students from underrepresented minority groups. Six-year graduation rates for white students at American colleges and universities are still nearly 30 percentage points higher than for black students, and nearly 20 points higher than for Hispanic students. Those numbers should outrage anyone with an interest in American higher education.

09242014-Pedagogy
Pedagogy Unbound
Looking for inspiration on teaching or some specific strategies? David Gooblar, a former lecturer in rhetoric at the University of Iowa who is now associate director of Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching, writes about classroom issues in these pages. Here is a sampling of his recent columns.
  • What Elizabeth Warren Can Teach Us About Teaching
  • 3 Questions That Can Improve Your Teaching
  • What Is ‘Indoctrination’? And How Do We Avoid It in Class?

With both climate change and college completion, the problem is not a lack of knowledge about what needs to be done, but a lack of other things: will, effective collaboration, money, luck.

A good example of what I mean can be found in a recent article in The Chronicle about efforts to reform large introductory courses at the University of Michigan. Such courses at research universities are notorious for a lot of reasons, not least because they so often seem to be at the center of college-opportunity gaps. As the article reported: “The students who struggle in gateway courses are disproportionately lower-income, first-generation, or from underrepresented minorities.” Michigan is looking to change that through a $5-million project that is designed to transform courses taken by 80 percent of the university’s undergraduates.

ADVERTISEMENT

Yet what struck me most while reading about the project was how little novelty there was in the reforms being put into place at Michigan. Don’t get me wrong: The university is adopting some effective practices. But they are not revolutionary ideas:

  • Some of the intro courses are integrating peer mentors.
  • Other courses are explicitly teaching metacognitive skills and study strategies.
  • For an intro class in business administration, the professors agreed on three significant learning goals and then used them to “backward-design” assessments and class activities.
  • An intro physics course is trying out small classes in which students solve problems rather than memorize formulas from lectures.

Peer mentors. Study strategies. Backward design. Small, problem-solving courses. Those are precisely the kinds of things that teaching centers — like the one I work for — recommend all the time. Michigan is betting that an investment in effective teaching practices will lead to outsize changes in outcomes for students.

What is, frankly, shocking is how rarely colleges and universities take such an approach even though we know it works.

Nearly every institution in higher education has as a stated goal: Create a welcoming and diverse environment for all students. Some go further and explicitly aim to close achievement gaps between privileged and underprivileged groups of students. Go to the website of any major university, and it’s easy to find an ambitious initiative to improve the success of underrepresented students and reduce completion gaps.

What’s not so easy to find are diversity initiatives that have anything to do with teaching.

ADVERTISEMENT

Search Our Advice Finder

Advice Finder Home Page Promo
Do you need help getting ahead in your career? Are you looking for solutions to put your college ahead of the curve?

Our new Advice Finder is for you.

Search this interactive tool to find ways to sharpen your teaching, improve student success, and meet new challenges in higher education head on. You’ll get guidance you can use whether you’re new to higher education, new to your role, or simply need a refresher.

Try it out by selecting your role on campus, or browse by topic. Get started here.

Sure, you’ll find commitments to hire more minority faculty members and vague intentions to “enhance the curriculum by including the contributions and perspectives of different races, cultures, and gender.” But in most campus-diversity plans, it’s rare to see any attention paid to teaching practices or to find any real investment in helping faculty members improve their teaching in ways that will help underrepresented students succeed.

All of that is even more surprising given how much research has been conducted in recent years on closing academic-achievement gaps within college courses. Here’s some of what we now know:

  • So-called “highly structured” courses have been shown to lead to significant gains in academic performance for students from educationally and/or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. “Highly structured” means that each class session is designed as a time when students work. They have to prepare for class, participate in active-learning exercises throughout class, and complete regular, low-stakes assessments throughout the semester. Those techniques worked to narrow the achievement gaps in large classes, and didn’t require much in the way of financial resources to adopt.
  • A simple “values affirmation” intervention — jargon for asking students to write about their most important personal values — can have a surprisingly strong effect on academic performance for students who typically struggle in college. Studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of this strategy among first-generation college students, underrepresented-minority students, and women in STEM disciplines. Although researchers warn against seeing this as a magic bullet, it does seem that giving students an opportunity to reflect about what they most value can go a long way toward mitigating the effects of stereotype threat (the fear of confirming stereotypes about their own group).
  • How you as the professor view your students and their capabilities has a real impact on which ones succeed in class. In a 2019 study, researchers at the University of Indiana found that a professor’s mindset — a belief that intelligence is either fixed or malleable — was the characteristic that most influenced achievement gaps by race in STEM courses. In short, students were more successful in a class where the professor believed their ability could be improved with practice than when the instructor treated their ability to learn as fixed.

There’s also reason to believe that helping underrepresented-minority students succeed in class will have an outsize effect on their graduation rates. A remarkable study, published in 2018, analyzed longitudinal data to better understand the persistent college-completion gap between white and black students. When the researchers studied those populations before they entered college — looking for factors that best predicted success in college — they found, unsurprisingly, that differences in income and school quality were the biggest contributor to the graduate-rate gap by race.

But they found something different when they looked for the factors that had the biggest influence on achievement once students were in college. What mattered most was academic performance. In contrast with earlier studies, which suggested that social engagement was the key to student persistence, this study found that differences in GPA explained “most of the discrepancy in black and white students’ completion rates.” That is to say: If you help these students succeed academically in their college courses, you help them to graduate.

ADVERTISEMENT

Will changes in how we teach result in the elimination of college-completion gaps? Probably not. There are still far too many forces outside of an institution’s control, ensuring that inequality will continue to mar almost all sectors of American life.

But what about within the realm we do control?

We have a pretty good idea of how to teach in a way that narrows gaps in academic achievement. What we don’t have are institutional cultures that spread this knowledge and resources that support instructors in making these changes. Help faculty members teach better, and you’ll help more students succeed.

Read other items in this Pedagogy Unbound package.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Teaching & Learning
David Gooblar
David Gooblar is an assistant professor of English and of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa. He was previously associate director of Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching. His most recent book, The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, was published by Harvard University Press in 2019. To find more advice on teaching, browse his previous columns here.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
    Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
  • The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
    The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
    Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
    Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2023 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin