79 – Education Topics for Specialized Audiences
Understanding Persistence of Black Males in STEM
Raymond D. Mooring
Analysis Made Easy
If you can keep them enrolled through their first year, it's a good chance that you will keep them to graduation! If this is indeed true as other researchers suggest, then it is imperative that potential barriers to persistence (internal, external, and institutional) through the first year be eliminated or mitigated as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the nation's college students are not a homogeneous group. That is, the barriers for one group may or may not be barriers for another group. Regrettably, many of the research studies in the literature have considerable limitations: they are based on data from a handful of schools and/or are based on data from schools without sizable minority populations. In this study, we use nationwide administrative data to determine and rank the characteristics that are most associated with the first-year persistence of Black males majoring in STEM. We use several multivariate techniques to address the following overarching research questions: What characteristics are most associated with persistence for Blacks? For Black males majoring in STEM? What has more predictive power in predicting persistence: academic preparation, academic and social integration, or finances?