The new collegiate diversity: The academic progress of immigrants in higher education.
Item
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Title
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The new collegiate diversity: The academic progress of immigrants in higher education.
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Identifier
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AAI3169982
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identifier
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3169982
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Creator
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Skadberg, Ingrid.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Paul Attewell
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Education, Higher | Education, Administration
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Abstract
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In the early to mid-twentieth century, social theorists stressed immigrant adaptation to mainstream American society. By the closing decades of the century, however, a new perspective had gained ground. In this perspective, immigrants were seen as benefiting from retaining their own cultural identities. Despite debates about the costs, or benefits, of maintenance of immigrant identities, little research has been done on how immigrants fare in urban universities of the type that have historically provided stepping stones to social advance. The advantages of having a college degree for improving one's socioeconomic status are well known, as are the difficulties minority students face in earning a college degree and achieving at high levels in college. Because large numbers of urban students today are foreign born, de-aggregating racial and ethnic groups by place of birth becomes increasingly important. The City University of New York, a university system of over 200,000 undergraduates, nearly half of whom are foreign-born, provides a unique opportunity to study immigrant students and to identify how white, black, Hispanic, and Asian native-born students are faring educationally compared to their immigrant peers.;Using the 1995 CUNY Student Experience Survey and additional institutional data, this research tests current assimilation theories with an urban college student population and compares factors that affect GPA, odds of graduating, years to graduation, and degree aspirations among students from different racial and ethnic groups. Results suggest that: (1) Immigrant students have an advantage on all measures of college performance as compared to native-born students. (2) Black students seem to benefit from being less assimilated. Hispanic students, however, seem to benefit from longer residence in the U.S. and from being more socially integrated. (3) College experience reduces the performance gap between minority and white students in some cases and widens it in others. (4) When college experiences are positive, gaps in retention between students of different academic skill level disappear. (5) Academic integration has a consistently positive effect on GPA and degree aspirations for all racial and ethnic groups. This study concludes with policy and programming suggestions for improving the performance and retention of a diverse college student population.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
