High school role models and minority college achievement

Large racial differences persist in college enrollment and major choice, which may be exacerbated by the racial distribution of high school teachers. In this paper, I present the first evidence that matching high school students with same-race teachers improves the students’ college enrollment. To address selection and the sorting of students and teachers, I use detailed Texas administrative data on classroom assignment, exploiting variation in student and teacher race within the same course, year, and school, eliminating 99% of observed same-race sorting. Race-matching raises minority students’ course performance as well as improves longer-term outcomes like high school graduation and college enrollment. Black and Hispanic students matching with a same-race teacher in a given subject also become more likely to major in that subject in college with strong effects for STEM majors. Finally, I find much smaller race-matching for White students, suggesting policies to make the teaching population more representative would benefit minority students with minimal negative spillovers to the White student population.