Chair Joseph asks about underrepresented minority participation; Kim Holland gives data
Chair Joseph cites an almost 8 percentage point graduation-rate difference for underrepresented minority study abroad students. Holland says last year's participants were 34.2% Hispanic, 11.7% Black, 4.5% multiracial, 27.4% white, and 22% Asian, and that 48.7% were Pell eligible but only 1.2% had public assistance history.
Research studies show that underrepresented minority students, the difference in graduation rate in six years was almost 8% percentage point for study abroad students compared to those who did not study.
If the findings are generally true, how important is the community to make an active effort to recruit students to study abroad?
Are these findings true?
For underrepresented minority students to study abroad?
How do we recruit?
I have a few statistics on that.
So last year, 34.2% of our students who studied abroad identified as Hispanic, 11.7% identified as Black, and 4.5% identified as multiracial.
White and Asian students made up 27.4% and 22% of our study abroad students, respectively.
Now, we know that that is not well aligned with our overall populations.
So 48.7% of our students who study abroad are Pell eligible.
And unfortunately, at the very low end of the income spectrum, we see that only 1.2% of our study abroad students are or have at some point in their college career qualified for public assistance.
That's based on CUNY Edge data.
So we can follow up.
We're still getting support from our institutional research team.
I'd love to provide a little more on first-generation students, which is another angle to look at it through.
But I think all of this says we are making some progress here, but it is woefully insufficient, and we're very conscious of that fact.
I also really appreciated that you highlighted in your opening remarks that community college students should be studying abroad more.
Our statistics bear that out.
We do, in fact, have one community college that has been extremely successful with support from an outside organization.
But that's not a solution for each of our community colleges, and we need to create space for all of them to find.
Their own solutions.
I do want to say I had hoped, and I'm still trying to parse through the data, I had hoped to find more
more evidence of students who transfer from community colleges studying abroad after they transfer as vertical transfer students.
So far, the patterns I've found have not been encouraging, but I think that that specific population, targeting those students,
identifying the barriers that face our vertical transfer students would go a long way towards the access and equity priorities.