Study: Minority-Serving Schools Serve Students of Color as Well as Predominantly White Institutions - Higher Education

Study: Minority-Serving Schools Serve Students of Color as Well as Predominantly White Institutions - Higher Education: A new study challenges the notion that Black and Latino students are less likely to earn a college degree if they attend minority-serving institutions, such as historically Black universities or Hispanic-serving universities.

The study, “The Effect of Enrolling in a Minority-Serving Institution for Black and Hispanic Students in Texas,” reports that Black and Latino students who enroll at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) are equally as likely to complete college as Black and Latino students who attend other colleges and universities. The study, which focuses on three cohorts of college enrollees from 1997 to 2008, was published in the Research in Higher Education journal in late July.

Dr. Stella Flores, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University, said that conventional graduation statistics show that college completion of Black students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) falls about 7 percent below non-MSIs, and Latino student graduation rates lag by roughly 11 percent at Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) when compared to Latino completion at non-MSIs.