Matching students to same-ethnicity instructors measurably reduces dropout and raises grades

Evidence

By exploiting large data sets of students, courses, and instructors, my UBC colleague Florian Hoffman and his collaborators unearthed real-world evidence consistent with the experimental findings discussed above: being taught by instructors whom you match on ethnicity/race reduces your dropout rate and raises your grades. In fact, for African-American students at a community college, being taught by an African-American instructor reduced class dropout rates by 6 percentage points and increased the fraction attaining a B or better by 13 percentage points. Similarly, using data from freshman (first-years) at the University of Toronto, Florian’s team has also shown that getting assigned to a same-sex instructor increased students’ grades a bit. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Strong real-world finding relevant to the reader’s coercion-vulnerability framework if same-group transmission biases concentrate in certain demographics and ages. — connects to: Matched-pair field experiments provide the strongest evidence of hiring discrimination — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 278
• SEED: Angle for an essay: institutional design can systematically route who gets heard and learned from—teachers matched to learners reshapes achievement before any explicit content choice.

Broader Connections

• Matched-pair field experiments provide the strongest evidence of hiring discrimination #expands (0.75) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 278