Giving Compass' Take:

• Jill Barshay highlights research that analyzes graduation rates by race and ethnicity at colleges and universities in Virginia and Connecticut to better grasp inequality in these schools.

• Why does a student’s lack of financial resources predict the gap in graduation likelihood between Black and white students? How can donors help close the gap?

• Here are three ways to help more low-income students get through college. 

One way to look at inequality in America is to notice how people of different races and ethnicities get sorted into different colleges. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 percent of all black college students attend just four colleges, according to research by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. They’re not the state’s most selective institutions such as University of Virginia in Charlottesville, William and Mary College or Virginia Tech. Instead, large numbers of black students attend Old Dominion and Virginia Commonwealth universities.

This segregated sorting in higher education is somewhat understandable. Black students are less likely to apply and be admitted to the state’s top tier schools. Black Virginians were more likely to have grown up in poor neighborhoods and attended elementary, middle and high schools with other poor students, less experienced teachers and fewer resources.  Still the racial concentration in just a few institutions is striking, given that Virginia has sizable black populations in many counties throughout the eastern half of the state and a wide choice of colleges and universities.

But another way to think about educational inequality is to analyze how students fare at the same institution.  The Urban Institute researchers calculated graduation rates by race and ethnicity in Virginia and Connecticut and found that white and Asian students graduate at higher rates than black and Latino students at most colleges. At some colleges in Virginia, the gap exceeds 30 percentage points. For example, 50 percent of white and Asian students obtained their four-year bachelor’s degrees within six years at the Jefferson College of Health Science in Roanoke (now part of Radford University) compared to only 18 percent of blacks and Latinos.  At all four-year universities and colleges in Virginia, the average graduation gap between whites and Asians and blacks and Latinos is 16 percentage points. Black and Latino students do graduate at higher rates than white and Asian students at two historically black Virginia universities, Hampton and Virginia State. The gaps are smaller in Connecticut and at two-year colleges but they still exist.

Read the full article about inequality in colleges by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.