Profiles of Undergraduate Completers: Deconstructing the Heterogeneity

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: College Student Persistence and Completion

Abstract

A person-centered approach identified five empirically unobserved student profiles of first-time full-time university students who shared similar academic patterns, performance measures, and demographic characteristics. Honors and Flourishing classes tended to graduate within 6 years, attempted their first-college math course and made continued degree progress. The Flourishing class had lower semester and first-college math GPAs than the Honors but higher GPAs than the Tenacious class. Placement in remedial mathematics alone did not determine class membership. The Honors class had an overrepresentation of White women, but an underrepresentation of Black men. Hispanic students were most prevalent in the Flourishing group while Black students were more prevalent in the Tenacious group. As a whole, men fared much worse on outcomes than women.

Authors

• Susan Troncoso Skidmore, Sam Houston State University

• Linda Reichwein Zientek, Sam Houston State University

• Forrest Lane, Sam Houston State University

• Kim Nimon, The University of Texas - Tyler