New educational strategies may allow for a narrowing of the education gap between white and minority students, according to papers presented Friday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. Michael J. Hilmer, a visiting assistant professor of economics at Brigham Young University and one of the authors of the paper, said the topic was extremely important because bans on affirmative action were limiting the pool of minority students who may enroll at four-year institutions right out of high school. The other authors of the paper are Eric R. Eide, an associate professor of economics at Brigham Young, and Dan D. Goldhaber, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute. In addition, those transfer students have the same likelihood of graduating from the four-year institutions as students who enrolled directly.
Hispanic students appear to gain the most from attending community colleges.
Charles Brown, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, presented the preliminary findings of his work comparing how black and white children of career military personnel perform on standardized tests for eighth-grade students. He found that, for such students, the performance gap between black and white students is one-third smaller than the gap in the overall population. Mr. Brown said that skeptics might think that white children in military families don't do as well as other white students, but in fact, white military students do better than the national average. As a result, he said, the performance of black students in military families is closer to that of white students nationally than to that of black students. Mr. Brown plans to extend his study to college-going rates, SAT scores, and other measures of educational performance.