Journal 4

Question: What demographic affects student performance in college most?

           

The article I looked at is titles, “Race, Ethnicity, and college success.” It looks at race and all the factors that go into predicting a student’s academic success.  The article specifically looks at the effect of race on college enrollment, the effect of race on the type of college attended, and the effect of race on career plans. The article elaborates to say that males are less likely to enroll in college than females, and that taking dual credit and AP/IB classes are strong indicators for predicting college access. The article concludes that race negatively impacts college completion.

I find this article responding well to my other articles because of its focus on demographics and their affect on student performance. This article mainly talks about race and its affect on college attendance (which can be correlated to academic success). However this article talks a lot about a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the use of race in college admission, and whether having a more diverse student population educationally benefits all students at the university. I feel that the article may be contradicting itself in the fact that it concludes that race negatively impacts college completion but it also states that having a more diverse student population benefits academic success. Therefore when writing my paper and looking at what things the article does well/doesn’t, looking at it’s viewpoints and contradictions would be beneficial to the paper as a whole.

            This article has brought me to look more closely at not only the academics of students in relation to race and other demographics but to also look at the probability of different students going to college in general and look at what factor/demographic would stop students from going to college the most. However this would mean greatly altering my topic and switching it from looking at what demographic affects academic success the most to what demographic predicts college enrollment the most, and I think my original question would give me the most information and would be easiest to research, however looking at the statistics for college enrollment see important.

            I plan on continuing to look at what demographic affects academic success the most. To do this I must look at another article which discusses a different variable for demographics (i.e. gender, social class, ect) and its affect on academic success. From there I will compare the effect of race on academic success to the other demographics and research articles that state what demographic affects academic success most.