Why Georgia State University graduates more minority students than other urban research universities

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• Joeff Davis/CL File??
• A Georgia State student studying in the GSU student center.?

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While Georgia State University’s student diversity has been in the spotlight in recent weeks, a new article puts the school’s demographics in a different context. It focuses on how the school is bucking the downward trend plaguing most urban research universities by graduating higher rates even as the school’s student body becomes increasingly challenged.???? Georgia State University should be facing an academic crisis. It serves several demographics that American higher education has largely been failing: 56 percent of the university’s 32,000 students receive federal Pell Grants, 60 percent are nonwhite, and 30 percent are first-generation college students. But at this university in downtown Atlanta, minority students - in defiance of national trends - are actually more likely to graduate than white students.
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The article is part of a weeklong joint series between The Atlantic and the National Journal that focuses on innovative ideas in American education.?

Reporter Sophie Quinton credits GSU’s against-the-grain success to a program that pays high-achieving students to help fellow struggling students. Using federal work study funding, the school hires A-students as Supplemental Instructors to tutor those students who need help to pass required introductory courses. The program has been in play since the 1990s, and in the last decade Georgia State has boosted its graduation rate by 22 percent, “even though state spending per student has shrunk and the student population has grown poorer and more diverse,” Quinton writes.???? The dirty little secret of American higher education is that it’s really good at protecting privilege and less good at ensuring social mobility. There’s a 45-percentage-point gap between the share of wealthy students and poor students who complete bachelor’s degrees, according to University of Michigan researchers. White students outperform Hispanics in B.A. completion by 12 points and African-Americans by 23 points, according to federal statistics, and first-generation students are less likely to attend and graduate from college than students with college-educated parents. Overall, just 56 percent of U.S. students who enroll in a four-year degree program graduate in six-years.? ??

Georgia State’s graduation rate, at about 53 percent, is below the national average. But it’s way above the graduation rate at comparable urban research universities, such as Cleveland State or the University of Texas (San Antonio). And here, there is no achievement gap. Students who receive need-based federal Pell Grants are as likely to graduate as those who don’t. Sixty-six percent of Latino and 57 percent of African-American students graduate within six years, compared with 51 percent of whites.? ?

Those lower graduation rates among white students could add another layer of complexity to the findings of Dr. Dhanfu Elston’s qualitative study on white student disengagement. Could there be a direct correlation between the two????
? In the Atlantic/National Journal article, Supplemental Instruction leader Memusi Ntore, a GSU junior, exemplifies the success of the SI program, especially among minority students like himself: ?

??? “I didn’t have a lot of people who looked like me doing math,” the Atlanta-raised son of Kenyan immigrants says of his high school teachers. What he can offer underserved students goes beyond being a role model, he says. He provides living proof that excelling at math isn’t predetermined by what you look like or where you come from. At Georgia State, Ntore is already setting an example.
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Read the full joint article between The Atlantic and the National Journal.?