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Outcome Gaps in the 8th Grade Cohort

ByBlake Decker

We continue our summer blog series reviewing the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s (THECB) “Texas Talent Trajectory (T3)” project. In our previous blog post, we presented data on educational outcomes for members of the three-year 8th-grade cohort (FY2011-FY2013) based on students’ economic status, finding that just over 9 percent of economically disadvantaged students completed a bachelor’s degree at a Texas public university within 11 years of entering 8th grade. This blog post will review T3 outcomes data for students based on their race/ethnicity status as categorized during their 8th-grade year of enrollment at Texas public middle schools.

Texas Talent Trajectory (T3) Data Comparison by Race/Ethnicity

  • There were 1.08 million students in the 8th-grade cohort: 13% (140,670) were Black or African American students; 49% (532,192) were Hispanic students; 32%  (346,951) were White students; and, 6% (61,415) were included in the “Other” students category. The four race/ethnicity categories were provided by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and THECB. The “Other” category includes, in part, students who were Asian American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.
  • High School Diploma: 81% of 8th graders earned a high school diploma from a Texas public high school in the T3 data. As shown in the visualization below, there was a 7.4-percentage point difference between the highest high school graduation rate group (Other: 85.3%) and lowest (Black students: 77.9%), with Hispanic students at 80.5% and White students at 82.4%.
  • Higher Education Enrollment: The statewide overall percentage of students who enrolled in higher education in the 8th-grade cohort was 52.1%, with the group averages ranging from 47.1% for Hispanic students to 63% for Other students. Almost 31% of White students and Hispanic students in the 8th-grade cohort entered 2-year institutions in Texas, just above the state average of 30.3%. For enrollment in Texas 4-year institutions, the statewide average was 21.8% for the 8th-grade cohort. Only 16.3% of Hispanic students in the 8th-grade cohort enrolled in a 4-year university in Texas, with 22.6% of Black students and 27.1% of White students enrolling in Texas public universities within 6 years of high school graduation.
  • Higher Education Credential: Across the three-year 8th-grade cohort, only 1 in 4 students earned a higher education credential (certificate, associates, bachelors) from a Texas public institution within 11 years of starting the 8th grade. At the bachelor’s degree level, 18% of all students in the 8th-grade cohort earned a bachelor’s degree, with the group-level averages being 12.6% for Hispanic students, 12.7% for Black students, 25.4% for White students, and 34.9% for “Other” students.
NOTES: The “Statewide” data (shown with the black ‘+‘ sign) provide the average percentage for each of the outcome variables. Current T3 data do not include enrollment and earning of credentials at out-of-state higher education institutions. These data, plus employment outcomes, will be added by THECB in the future. Hovering over the symbols in each chart will show additional information.
Abbreviations: "HS" = High School | "HE" = Higher Education

So What?

As we have been unpacking the T3 data in this summer blog series, a few trends have certainly been evident:

  • There were 24.6% of all students in the 8th-grade cohort earning a higher education credential within 11 years of entering the 8th grade. 
  • Across the state, only 16 out of every 100 students (15.8%) in the 8th-grade cohort who were eligible for free/reduced lunch (economically disadvantaged) completed either a certificate, associate’s degree, or bachelor’s degree from a Texas public or independent college or university. This means that only 97,668 of the 618,994 8th-grade students who were economically disadvantaged in the multi-year cohort earned a higher education credential within 11 years of starting 8th grade. 
  • Fewer than 1 out of 5 Hispanic or Black students in the 8th-grade cohort completed a higher education credential at a Texas public institution, meaning that more than 543,635 of the 672,862 (80.8%) Hispanic or Black students in the 8th-grade cohort did not earn a higher education credential in Texas within 11 years of starting 8th grade.
In our final blog post in this series, we will combine the economic status of students with the race/ethnicity categories to see how those two meaningful variables interact to affect outcomes in the 8th-grade cohort.