Who’s Matched Up? Access to Same-Race Instructors in Higher Education

Despite consistent evidence on the benefits of same-race instructor matching in K-12 settings and developing work in higher education, research has yet to conceptualize and document the incidence of same-race matching. That is, even if same-race matching produces positive effects, how likely are racially minoritized students to ever experience an instructor of the same race? Using administrative data from Texas on the universe of community college students and instructors over seven years, we document the rate of same-race matching overall and across racial/ethnic groups, the courses in which students are more or less likely to match, and the types of instructors who most commonly serve as matches. We also leverage student fixed effects models to show descriptive differences in credit accumulation, course pass rates, and course grades between matched and unmatched students and courses. We show that experiencing a same-race match is correlated with meaningfully higher course grades, pass rates, and credit hour accumulation particularly among racially minoritized students. However, we also show that there is substantial variation in the incidence of same-race matching across racial groups. This investigation expands our understanding of the relationship between same-race matching and students’ outcomes in college while also offering a new framework for considering access to (or the “take-up” of) the benefits of same-race matching to guide future research and policy.