Panel Paper:
Classmates like Me: Race and Ethnicity in College
Saturday, April 13, 2019
Continuing Education Building - Room 2030 (University of California, Irvine)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Using administrative data from a large California community college, I examine whether minority students are affected by the race and ethnicity of classmates. To identify social interactions, I leverage classroom level enrollment variations in racial and ethnic compositions on more than 186,000 course enrollments by 83,000 first-time students with limited class choices. The setting and richness of the data provide a robust examination of interactions with the inclusion of individual and class fixed effects. I find that Hispanic and African-American students are more likely to persist in and pass classes when there are more classmates of their own race and ethnicity. This is especially true for Hispanic students in courses that are transferable to the University of California and California State University systems.
