Proceedings of the 7th International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Data-driven Approach to Closing Equity Gaps in Higher Education
Ming Chen, Jasmine Yur-Austin
ABSTRACT:
California is one of the States with the most diverse population, which is reflected in the type of students California State University serves. The 23 CSU campuses collectively enroll more than 480,000 students, among whom nearly half are underrepresented minorities. Among CSU undergraduates, proximate one-third of them are the first in their families to attend colleges and 54% of them receive Pell grants. The College of Business’s mission aims to promote social mobility by providing affordable and high-quality business education to our ethnically, economically and academically diverse student body. How do we achieve COB’s mission if we examine and measure the students’ completion of courses patterns through the lens of equity, diversity and inclusion? Hence, we have to move beyond tolerance of differences and should purposefully dismantle academic barriers and create system-wide action plans to engage the disadvantaged students. It is also our common purpose to prepare our students for meaningful professional life when they join the workforce.
The persistent equity problem in U.S. higher education has been reported in many prior studies (Carnevale and Strohl, 2013; Perna and Finney, 2014; Witham et al., 2015). These studies have shown that minoritized, low-income students, first-generation students, and students of color tend to underperform their white and affluent counterparts in a number of aspects such as course completion rates and graduation rates. CSULB is no exception! Take College of Business for example, the 4-year graduation rates for the fall 2016 first-time freshmen cohort are 23%, 35%, 51%, and 56.8% for black, Hispanic, Asian, and white students respectively. The 4-year graduation rate in the same cohort for first-generation students is 34% (all races/ethnicities combined) as compared to 48.7% (all races/ethnicities combined) for those with parents graduated from college. However, the silver lining to the existing equity-gap issues inherent in higher education institution is that legislatures, higher education leaders along with philanthropic foundations have begun to acknowledge such dire situation and then pour significant resources into creating equitable higher education environment (Malcom-Piqueux and Bensimon, 2017). In addition, the perpetuation of inequity in the context of higher education would be framed as “problem of practice” instead of “problems with students” (Bensimon and Malcom 2012; Bensimon and Spiva, 2022), which call for the institutions take more responsibilities to eliminate the disparities for all students. The holistic review is imperative to explore the structure and policy deep-rooted in higher education which contributes to the prevalent inequity outcomes.
In this study, we work with CSULB Institutional Research & Analytics and examine data containing students’ demographic information and academic records in College of Business during the past ten years for incoming cohorts from Fall 2011 to Fall 2021. The dataset contains information for a total of 15,983 students. Comprehensive student data and thorough data analytics are important allies in this project. Collectively, they not only equip College of Business with essential information about how College of Business students performed, but also provide the insights and recommend tools needed to identify the underlying “causes” and further propose “solutions” to address students’ needs. By analyzing comprehensive students’ academic records along with their demographic data enables us to precisely measure equity gaps, identify roadblocks and hurdles that affect their success, and hence pinpoint the critical areas where college resources should be allocated in the most cost-effective way to maximize the chance of success when implementing the proposed solutions.
Through our preliminary analysis, we find that minority students, first generation students, and students from low-income families tend to underperform their peers. They not only take longer time to graduate, but also earn lower grades in almost all courses. They also underperform their peers with similar prior academic performance. Additionally, we find that older students tend to take longer time to graduate; however, their graduation rates are on par with their younger peers and their grades may not necessarily be lower than their younger peers. Except for the groups with transfer GPA 3.5 and above in which younger students clearly outperform their older peers, the difference among various age groups is not significant in other GPA ranges. Regarding gender, female students tend to outperform male students. This is particularly evident for freshmen students. Female students significantly outperform their male peers in some critical courses. We show that prior academic performance (including high-school GPA, transfer GPA, SAT, and ACT scores) is a clear indicator of students’ ability to graduate on time. FIN 300
Business Finance, HRM 360 Organizational Behavior, IS 310 Business Statistics, and MGMT 300 Principles of Management and Operations are the most obvious bottlenecks that create challenges for minority, first generation, and low-income students. Higher grades (“A” and “B”) in COB core courses generally indicate a higher probability of completing the degree in a given time window. Those who earned a “C” generally have a lower chance of completing the degree on time, but their chance of completing the degree in an extended time window, i.e., in six years for freshmen and in 4 years for transfers, are only slightly lower than those who earned an “A” or “B”. We demonstrate that logistic regression model can be used to predict timely graduation with reasonable accuracy. High-school GPA, gender, minority status, first generation, and Pell eligibility are good explanatory variables. Grades in critical COB courses can also be used to predict timely graduation, in particular, FIN 300 Business Finance, IS 310 Business Statistics, MGMT 300 Principles of Management and Operations, and HRM 360 Organizational Behavior.
keywords: Timely graduation, higher education, equity gaps, data-driven