Profiles of Undergraduate Completers: Deconstructing the Heterogeneity

Abstract

A person-centered approach identified five empirically unobserved student profiles of first-time full-time university students who shared similar academic patterns, performance measures, and demographic characteristics. Honors and Flourishing classes tended to graduate within 6 years of attempting their first-college mathematics course, earned a high grade in that course, and made continued degree progress. The Flourishing class had lower semester and first-college mathematics GPAs than the Honors class but higher GPAs than the Tenacious class. Placement in remedial mathematics alone did not determine class membership. The Honors class had an overrepresentation of White women, and an underrepresentation of Black men. Hispanic students were most prevalent in the Flourishing group while Black men were more prevalent in the Tenacious group. As a whole, men fared worse on outcomes than women.