Breaking Down the STEM Pathway: The Contribution of Neighborhood Institutional Resources to Diverse Racial/Ethnic Youth’s STEM Attainment

• In Event: Diversity in Children's Development across Neighborhood Contexts

Abstract

Shortages in the domestic STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workforce have become conventional wisdom. The acute STEM achievement gaps between minority youth (e.g., Black, Latinx youth in general, and Mexican-origin youth specifically) and their White and Asian peers (e.g., Landivar, 2013) provide evidence of a large amount of undeveloped talent in these populations (Anderson & Ward, 2016). Research suggests the high school period is a pivotal time for widening STEM racial/ethnic disparities (Simpkins, Price, & Garcia, 2015). These underrepresented groups face multiple (e.g., social, cultural, and linguistic) challenges in the educational system (Gibson, Gandara, & Koyama, 2004); thus, addressing racial/ethnic disparities in STEM achievement should be a policy priority. Although STEM research has not focused on the neighborhood context, some research suggests that rich neighborhood institutional resources may foster youth’s STEM pursuits, especially among minority youth (Louie, 2012). Accordingly, this study aims to investigate whether diverse youth’s STEM attainment is associated with the availability of neighborhood institutional resources and whether there are racial/ethnic differences in the associations.

Primary data were drawn from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, a nationally representative longitudinal study tracking about 15,360 high school sophomores’ educational progress. STEM outcomes (i.e., receipt of a certificate or degree in STEM fields) were assessed in young adulthood. Further, the current study used novel data linking various STEM-related community resources (e.g., non-profit organizations, libraries, museums, and labor market) extracted from multiple administrative data sources at the zip code level. Our analytic sample consists of about 6,490 youth with some post-secondary education pursuits. About 550 of them pursued a STEM post-secondary degree. Table 1 presents the summary statistics of these variables and covariates by race/ethnicity and STEM outcomes.

The examination of neighborhood resources and youth’s post-secondary STEM attainment followed a multilevel modeling framework with random intercepts to estimate associations of neighborhood characteristics and individual-level outcomes. In addition, our analysis focuses on youth who pursued any post-secondary education, which causes selection biases. Thus, a two-stage modeling strategy utilizing the inverse Mills ratio (Heckman, 1977) was adopted. We included race/ethnicity and neighborhood institutional resources interaction terms to identify which institutional resources may be differentially associated with a specific race/ethnicity youth’s STEM attainment. The preliminary regression results are presented in Table 2.

Preliminary results indicated that White youth’s STEM attainment was not associated with neighborhood institutional resources; however, estimated interaction terms indicated that institutional resources may have more pronounced associations with minority youth’s STEM attainment than with White counterparts. For example, more minority- and immigrant-serving non-profit organizations were associated with Latino and Mexican-origin youth’s greater STEM attainment but were not associated with White youth’s outcomes.

Preliminary results call attention to how neighborhood resources may promote minority youth’s STEM attainment and can facilitate meeting the labor market demand within this high-growth sector of the economy (Howell & Timberlake, 2014). We plan to employ the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure to adjust for a false discovery rate given the number of interactions tested.

Authors

• Sae Hyun Oh, Tufts University
  Presenting Author

• Tama Leventhal, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author