“many of the underprivileged are not provided with the academic opportunities from pre-K through 12”
I’m sorry to say, it’s the reality. Our education system (and parents) lacks the ability or motivation to inspire children with the desire to learn. Inspire that desire and the rest takes care of itself. You can’t put out the fire of a passion for learning.
For many years I funded and coordinated a pre-school reading program. My philosophy is, if you create the desire to learn to read in children at an early age, they will love it and be readers the rest of their lives. If you wait until school begins and make them work to learn to read, they will view it negatively and resist reading the rest of their lives. I closed the program when Clinton’s Americore workers started the same thing at the local library competing directly against what I was doing. They lasted a short time and closed, but I was gone by then.
Based upon the study, a substantially greater portion of the black students selected majors and changed while white students stayed in the “Do Not Know” or undeclared as incoming freshmen.
Do not Know White 34.5% Black 21.7%
This could be a result of one person who was a minority adviser pushing their advisees to make an early selection. That resulted in an unrealistic selection by the incoming freshman. It could be caused by a simple policy that makes it more difficult to enter a major by transfer than taking advantage of the minority preference at time of admission.
There are too many unrelated factors influencing the results which were not considered in the study to give it much credibility.