A Diverse Issues in Higher Education article on “Experts: ‘Opportunity Gap’ Key Impediment to Black Male Academic Achievement” quoted Dr. Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science, extensively.
In a report on the International Colloquium on Black Males in Education last week, Autumn A. Arnett’s article asked, “What if the academic achievement problems with young Black males were not actually a problem with the students themselves, but a problem with those charged with educating them?”
Dr. Debra Thompson
A group of Ohio researchers examined local policy and its impact on Black males’ educational attainment. Because higher education is treated as a discretionary budget item, as opposed to a mandatory program, spending on higher education is often inadequate, said Dr. Debra Thompson, an assistant professor at Ohio University.
“The policies in higher ed aren’t just color blind; they’re color void,” Thompson said.
Despite the fact that policymakers acknowledge that Black male students are at a significant disadvantage, they are unable to account for why specific policies to combat the disadvantage and help boost African-American males’ success outcomes have not been implemented. Looking ahead to new policies on the books that will weight the individual performance and graduation rates of students heavier, Thompson wondered if, in the absence of proactive policies that seek to correct some of the historical disparities, Black male students will be left behind.
“It’s important to think about the incentives that policies create. If you’re incentivizing performance, if you’re incentivizing graduation rates, then we have to ask questions around whether institutions are going to be willing to accept, admit, enroll populations that historically have not graduated,” Thompson said.
Policymakers can’t be absolved of responsibility for the inequities of degree attainment among African-American males, she argued. This includes policy around access and affordability. Another well-documented issue is lack of financial resources needed to secure an education. Brooms said that, of the young Black males he has studied, a large majority are from multi-sibling households with less than $19,000 annual income. On top of the persistent economic gap, the cost of education has “skyrocketed,” Thompson said, making access to education more difficult today than it was in 1970.
“Student funding—grants and student aid—really hasn’t kept pace with these skyrocketing tuition fees. In fact, in terms of the grant aid from the state that actually goes directly to the students is really low—nationally, we’re talking about an average of $670” per semester, she said.
Thompson’s research and teaching interests are in the area of race and ethnic politics, compaDr. Thompson is currently revising a book manuscript, which is under review at Cambridge University Press. The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census is a comparative study of how and why the United States, Great Britain and Canada developed racial classifications on their national censuses, telling a story of the ways that politics construct the very concept of race.
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