Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Racial achievement gap is a persistent problem in United States. Whereas research direct a good deal of investigation to achievement gaps at K-12 level, higher education has enjoyed less extensive efforts with regard to closing the achievement gaps. According to U.S. census data, the gap between white and minority students in postsecondary degree attainments have widened by 2 percentage points between 2007 and 2015. It is important to understand the causes of such a trend. In addition, education is a driver of socio-economic. The racial gaps in educational achievement in college have great implications for earnings equality and social justice in general.

A common policy prescription for such phenomenon is to increase the number of role models for minority students. A growing body of literature has examined the impact of instructor and student interactions on closing achievement gaps. Studies of this line of inquiry at college level mostly focused on gender dynamics and found that instructors of the same gender had positive impacts on student’s course performance and major interest. Fairlie et al. (2014) provided the only post-secondary level evidence on teacher-student racial interaction and concluded that performance gap between white and minority students fell by 20-50 percent when taught by a minority instructor. Yet, there are remaining gaps in literature in this area, for example: 1) what is the long-term impact of having a same-race instructor; 2) are there any heterogeneous impacts of instructor-student racial interaction across different institutional settings?    

This study provides evidence of the impacts of instructor-student racial match on student’s current course performance, subsequent course taking and grades, major choice and labor market outcomes across different types of post-secondary institutions. I use detailed administrative data from all public two-year and four-year colleges in a state college system. I focus on 150,000 first time in college students who entered one of the institutions in the college system from 2005 to 2008. At student-course enrollment level, I analyze the 2,200,000 student-classroom observations to examine whether a same-race instructor affects the student’s current and subsequent course performance. To address student sorting across courses and classrooms, I controlled for both student and classroom fixed effects (FE). At student level, to explore the long-term impact on student’s labor market performance, I further use term-by-term variation in departmental faculty composition as an instrumental variable (IV) for the student’s proportion of courses taken with a same-race instructor conditional on the student’s course portfolio. The preliminary results suggest that there is a large and robust positive impact of instructor-student racial match on current course performance, which accounts for around 20% of the original racial gap in course grades. Having a same-race instructor in the introductory courses in a subject area also increases the student’s likelihood of taking more courses in the area and improves the student’s grade in the next course of the same subject. These results suggest that having a same-race instructor in one’s introductory course may help foster student’s interest in the subject area and evolve deep understanding of the course content.