Race and College Success: Evidence from Missouri

Conditional on enrollment, African American students are substantially less likely to graduate from four-year public universities than white students. Using administrative micro-data from Missouri, we decompose the graduation gap into racial differences in four factors: (i) how students sort to universities, (ii) how students sort to initial majors, (iii) high-school quality, and (iv) other preentry skills. Preentry skills explain 65 and 86 percent of the gap for women and men respectively. A small role is found for differential sorting into college, driven by African Americans' disproportionate representation in urban schools and schools at the very bottom of the quality distribution.