Confronting the Obstacles: African Americans' Quest for Higher Education

Abstract

125 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.The results indicated that African Americans (64%) were the third largest group from this cohort to attend a four-year institution falling behind Asian/Pacific Islanders (82%) and Whites (72%). However, the racial disparity that existed for African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics compared to Asians and Whites was relatively close ranging from 11% to 2% difference. These results mirrored those of current national trends showing a similar gap in four-year college attendance. Furthermore, a logistic regression analysis revealed that socio-economic status, ability, school quality, parental expectations, teacher expectations, GPA, and students' self reported estimation of how far they were likely to go in school were both statistically significant and increased the odds of going to college. The results indicated that social demographic factors such as race, socio-economic status, and family structure support several findings that are consistent with previous studies. Whereas previous studies indicated that being African American was viewed as a hindrance to educational attainment, this study suggested that race played a vital role in the college going process. In this study, being African American, controlling for other critical factors, was an asset in predicting college attendance. Regardless of an individual's environment this study revealed that if African Americans have and display the ability they would attend college. In essence these few individuals beat the odds.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD