Abstract
African American men face significant challenges to completing a college education. This is, in part, driven by societal and pre-college factors, but also by institutional characteristics and policies at the higher education level that put them at a disadvantage. My thesis seeks to hone in on institutional characteristics and policies by examining the research question: What impact do higher percentages of African American faculty have on African American male completion rate in the California Community Colleges? I do this by utilizing longitudinal cohort data from 108 California community colleges for cohorts beginning from 2007 to 2011 via the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office’s Data Mart. The dependent variables in my analyses are broken into four subgroups of African American male students meant to capture the effects of being economically advantaged/disadvantaged and academically prepared/unprepared. The primary finding of this thesis is that increasing the percentage of full-time African American faculty has positive impacts on completion rates across all subgroups of African American male students after dropping the African American part-time faculty variable due to collinearity. The magnitudes of these effects are relatively small, though, with a one-percentage-point increase in percentage of full-time African American faculty for a typical California community college, holding other explanatory factors constant, yielding an increase in completion rate for African American males between 0.231%-0.310%. The macroeconomic characteristics, which consisted of five dummy variables for each of the cohort start years after the excluded base year of 2007, had the largest negative impacts on completion rates which suggests that improving outcomes for African American men at this level is a multifaceted task that includes factors outside of the direct control of the institution. I discuss the policy implications of these results and what institutions can do to help these students. I conclude by noting that these findings have new relevance and implications given the unique nature of the time in which this thesis was written.