Time to Graduate for Latinos/Hispanics in Comparison to Other Diverse Student Groups: A Multi-Institutional/Multilevel MIDFIELD Study
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Date
2021
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Abstract
Higher institutions of education represent the social mobility mechanisms that create more just societies. The STEM fields are particularly critical in the development of these modern, more just societies. In the United States, the social and racial justice debates are ever more relevant and present in academia. Studies focused on under-represented and under-served groups in education, especially STEM fields, are timely and of paramount importance. This is a study that analyzed student data of 19 institutions, concentrated in what is known as the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). It utilized multilevel (HLM) analysis focused on the Time to Graduate outcome of under-represented populations, emphasizing the Latino/Hispanics group. Multilevel analysis is a powerful tool to evaluate differences in groups such as institutions and races/ethnicities, which is the type of data MIDFIELD affords. Results show that depending on the multilevel model, either fixed or random slope, there is a significant difference between the number of terms taken to graduate for under-represented groups, including Latinos/ Hispanics, compared to White groups and for Black compared to White groups. This suggests that Black students tend to be more impacted by their institution than other racial/ethnical groups. Since the emphasis was Latinos/Hispanics, the question remaining is if these results transfer to a sample with more Latino/Hispanic representation.
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Keywords
Multiple-Institution database, STEM, MIDFIELD, Latinos, Hispanics