Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A growing literature has investigated how gender and race impact the effectiveness of interactions between students and teachers in achieving educational goals (Dee, 2005; Bettinger and Long, 2005; Hoffmann and Oreopoulos, 2009; Carrell et. al. 2010; Fairlie et. al. 2014). However, the literature tends to focus on the student-teacher interactions and ignore another set of potentially important relationships and interactions that students develop---the student-adviser interactions. The literature’s neglect of the potentially important role that gender may play in affecting the efficacy of the student-adviser interactions is surprising, considering that the student-adviser interactions are found to contribute to student success (Bettinger and Baker, 2013; Carrell and Hoekstra, 2014).

This paper is aimed at filling this important gap in the literature by studying the effects of gender congruence on the efficacy of the student-adviser interactions in achieving educational goals (measured by student outcomes such as GPA). In so doing, we take advantage of our access to unique administrative data from a liberal arts university which includes detailed longitudinal records (including both academic and non-academic) on twenty cohorts of students (class of 1996 through class of 2015).

We examine the effects of gender congruence with first year faculty advisers. We take advantage of the university’s first-year faculty adviser assignment policy, which produces randomness in whether the student has a same-sex/same-race faculty adviser for the first year. Specifically, in the summer before coming to the University, each incoming freshman lists his/her preferred courses and the Registrar’s office uses this information and assigns courses, according to a preference-based algorithm. One of these courses will be a first-year seminar, and the instructor of this course will automatically become the student’s faculty adviser during the first year. The first-year seminar’s course, say introduction to economics, is not randomly assigned, for the student who expresses his/her interest in economics is more likely to be assigned to a first-year seminar in economics. However, conditional on the first-year seminar course, whether or not the student ends up with a female first-year seminar instructor (and hence first-year adviser) is random. Likewise, whether he/she has a minority first-year seminar instructor/adviser is also random. The variations in the adviser’s gender and race come both from multiple sections of the same course within each year and from cross-year staffing change offering the same course.

We first confirm econometrically that the assignment of students to their first-year academic advisers is indeed random. We then provide causal evidence on the lasting positive effect on academic outcome (graduation-time cumulative GPA) of having a same-gender academic adviser during the first year. The estimated positive effect is robust to the inclusion of various controls, such as the first-year seminar’s course fixed effects (e.g., introduction to economics, challenges of modernity, general chemistry I) and student socio-economic characteristics (gender, race, zip code medium income and others), and most importantly pre-college academic performance (high school GPA, and SAT/ACT).