Opportunities at Origin and Access to Higher Education Revealing New Dimensions of Exclusions

Over the past year the Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses (SEISMIC) collaborative (www.seismicproject.org) has provided fertile ground for cross-institutional data exploration. Main data sources for this work derived from widely available student records. In this presentation we will show the potential for integrating this data with other important sources of information; namely opportunity and vulnerability indexes developed at the state level (such as the California Regional Opportunity Index- ROI) or national levels that use data from the US Census. There is mounting evidence that opportunities in adulthood are significantly affected by the neighborhood characteristics at childhood. The use of proxies of opportunities from the California Regional Opportunity Index and the Opportunity Atlas (www.opportunityatlas.org) provide actionable dimensions of students’ past experiences and help highlight their relationships with outcomes at the university level. The significant relationships that these data have with first year performance and retention has important implications for policy and programs aimed at supporting students in their first year and beyond.

Speakers:
Marco Molinaro (Speaker) University of California Davis, Assistant Vice Provost for Educational Effectiveness