Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 66Higher Education Research StudiesCritical Race Theory in EducationCareer Development and Diversity

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 20 of the 20 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Low Black Student Retention on a Predominantly White Campus: Two Faculty Respond with the African American Student Network

Grier-Reed, Tabitha L., Madyun, Na'im H., Buckley, Christopher G.·2008·Journal of College Student Development
DOI 10.1353/csd.0.0031
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Low Black Student Retention on a Predominantly White Campus:Two Faculty Respond with the African American Student Network Tabitha L. Grier-Reed (bio), Na'im H. Madyun (bio), and Christopher G. Buckley (bio) Black student retention in institutions of higher education is an important 21st-century issue. Thompson, Gorin, Obeidat, and Chen (2006) asserted that Blacks are still underrepresented in institutions of higher education and graduate at lower rates than Whites and Asians over a 5-year period. According to the American Council on Education, at the turn of the century only 40% of eligible Black students went to college, with only 46% of the 40% graduating within 6 years (Astin & Oseguera, 2005). At our own university, a large Midwestern research institution, available data indicate that the 4-year graduation rate for even the highest ability students is approximately 25% higher for Whites than for Blacks (Zetterberg, 2003). This public university serves more than 65,000 students, with 40,437 of those being undergraduates (University Relations, 2006); Blacks make up 4.7% of the undergraduate population, and students of color comprise 17.3% (Office of Institutional Research, 2006). Considering Black undergraduates who enrolled in 1998, of those with the highest college entrance scores only about 25% graduated 4 years later, in 2002 (Zetterberg). In an effort to improve retention and graduation rates on our campus, two Black faculty have responded with the African American Student Network, or as students call it AFAM (signifying African American and "A Family"). We write the current paper to share our response to the problem of retention at our university and to explore Black student experiences. We include an overview of our program and a pilot study assessing the program's impact. Overview of the African American Student Network Black college students face a number of stressors including lack of knowledge about the college process, institutional racism, poor health and energy, social isolation, and family and economic problems (Arnold, 1993; D'Augelli & Hersberger, 1993), and when there is no critical mass of Blacks and/or students of color on campus, Black students' social networks tend to be compromised and the challenges compounded (D'Augelli & Hersberger; McCauley, 1988; Pike & Kuh, 2006). Facilitating intact social support systems and psychological well-being for Black college students is imperative, particularly on predominantly White campuses. AFAM is [End Page 476] designed to attend to the challenges by providing space for Black students to address, understand, and cope with stressors. The network includes university faculty and staff and provides students with access to upper classman in a supportive atmosphere. Conceived by two faculty members AFAM is a weekly networking group that meets over the lunch hour. The underlying philosophy of AFAM is that within each student is the ability to reduce the gap between the real and ideal self, and our role as faculty is to use the collective wisdom of the group to facilitate the closing of that gap. Relationships are at the cornerstone of AFAM, including relationship to self, others, and institutions. The group is open to all Black undergraduates on campus as well as graduate students, staff, and resource persons interested in stopping by and participating. Meeting over the lunch hour, we use food to build relationships and a sense of community. Food is cultural and an integral component of Black communal gatherings. Food is also sustenance, and its presence embodies the purpose of AFAM, which is to nurture Black students, mind, body, and spirit. Furthermore, breaking bread together recognizes universal basic needs for care and nourishment across status and hierarchy and helps create a sense of family or home—a secure base for Black students on a predominantly White campus. Psychological well-being is emphasized through the content of the group, where the focus is helping students understand and improve their relationship to self, others, community, and the university. At the core of any relationship is trust. In fact, Raider Roth (2005) argued that trust is essential for connection and often the culprit when there is disconnection. The group focuses on the four major ingredients Raider-Roth put forth for developing trustworthy relationships in educational settings. These include the ability to be connected to students, the ability...

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1353/csd.0.0031

Cites

20 of 20 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 20 references

Cited by

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Grier-Reed, T. L., Madyun, N. H., & Buckley, C. G.
Affiliations
University of Minnesota (US)
Venue
Journal of College Student Development
Publisher
Project MUSE
Published
2008-09
Volume
49
Issue
5
Pages
476-485
ISSN
  • 0897-5264 (ISSN-L)
  • 1543-3382
DOI
10.1353/csd.0.0031
OpenAlex
W2046606850
Cited by
66
References
20
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 2
FWCI
13.03
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Journal of college student development (publishedVersion)
  • Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education Research Studies
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Critical Race Theory in Education
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Career Development and Diversity
Keywords
predominantly white institutions, Black faculty, student support services, social isolation, social networks, institutional racism, African American college students, program impact evaluation, higher education equity, graduation rates, student stressors, faculty-student collaboration

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.