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The College Board has undertaken a new initiative focused on male minority members. The goal, as their website puts it, is to collect “research around the Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, to understand the issues behind the data, and to provide an overview of the legal landscape within which solutions must be developed.” More specifically, the College Board aims to “isolate and identify the factors that contribute either to the persistence or to the attrition of young men of color from high school to higher education.”

The “color” groups they designate are African American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Hispanic/Latinos and Native American, and Alaska Natives. I think this grouping scheme is problematic since it assumes a level of group homogeneity and lumps populations together in questionable ways—i.e. that Hispanics and Native Americans should be in one category, likewise with Asians and Pacific Islanders, whereas Alaska Natives get their own category. But the information still looks valuable in various ways.

Their research includes an extensive data and literature review, as well as primary source information from these demographics. This research is novel, in part, because it puts the information within the framework of six distinct pathways the young men of color take after high school (postsecondary education, military, employment, unemployment, incarceration, and death).

To provide rationale for this focus on minorities, the College Board notes several projected facts:

• That within a generation, the U.S. will be much more diverse than it currently is
• That in half a century, no racial/ethnic group will be a majority
• That the fastest-growing populations in the country are those minority groups with the lowest levels of educational attainment
• And that as a result, if current education and population trends continue, the U.S. will experience a decline in the educational attainment of the country as a whole.

An article on a panel discussion held by The College Board on Capitol Hill notes that some question the need for more data on educational attainment among men of color. In response, defenders said data is necessary to illustrate where the critical breaks are in the educational pipeline.

Their explanation of the focus on minorities is clear; however, the website does not provide their reasoning for focusing on just males rather than both genders. They make a passing reference to the fact that “in each racial and ethnic group young women are outperforming young men with respect to the attainment of high school diplomas, with even more pronounced disparities at the postsecondary level,” and the website provides data on higher female attainment in various categories. However, even among females many rates are less than stellar (unemployment rates, for example, are extremely high for both genders). I imagine there is some other underlying rationale—like the idea that children in these groups suffer when they lack exemplary male figures, or that male lack of attainment is correlated with single-parent families, or that neither gender will be able to fully reach their potential when the other gender is so hindered, or maybe simply that they are trying to find out the specifics on why females outperform males—but it is not explicitly stated.

I applaud the College Board’s effort at using research to try to create solutions for under-achieving minorities, and the website offers a good, interactive summary of some of the research findings and interviews. However, as noted, I think there are some problems with their aggregation of data by group (for example, they claim that only 5.1% of Asian males are employed after high school—I think there may be some conflation issues there with populations chosen and how they define employment) and gender. It would also be nice if they included information about whites to better contextualize the other findings.

Still it will be interesting to see what solutions they pursue in the future, and I certainly hope those attempts are effective.