National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen



Charles, Camille Z., Mary J. Fischer, Margarita Mooney, and Douglas S. Massey.

(2009) Princeton: Princeton University Press









Massey, Douglas S., Camille Z. Charles, Garvey Lundy, and Mary J. Fischer.

(2003) Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thirty years after deliberate minority recruitment efforts began, we still don't know why minority students underperform, or drop out of college. In The Shape of the River, William Bowen and Derek Bok documented the benefits of affirmative action for minority students, their communities, and the nation at large. But they also found that too many failed to achieve academic success.

In this book, Massey and colleagues investigate minority underperformance in selective colleges and universities. They explain how such factors as neighborhood, family, peer group, and early schooling influence the academic performance of students from differing racial and ethnic origins and differing social classes.

Drawing on a major new source of data-the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen-the authors undertake a comprehensive analysis of the diverse pathways by which whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians enter American higher education. Theirs is the first study to document the different characteristics that students bring to campus and to trace out the influence of these differences on later academic performance.

They show: Black and Latino students do not enter college disadvantaged by alackof self-esteem. In fact, overconfidence is more common than low self-confidence among some minority students; minority students are adversely affected by racist stereotypes of intellectual inferiority; although academic preparation is the strongest predictor of college performance, shortfalls in academic preparation are themselves largely a matter of socioeconomic disadvantage and racial segregation.