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OTTAWA, November 11, 2010  —  Two new research briefs released today by the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project show that among the lower income post-secondary education (PSE) students studied, immigrants and visible minorities are much less likely to drop out of their studies than are other students. “Parental expectations for completing PSE are much greater for these students, and this could be driving the low dropout rates we observe” says lead author and University of Ottawa professor Ross Finnie.

The MESA Project’s two new research briefs are based on the new Longitudinal Survey of Low-Income Students (L-SLIS), which interviewed just over 10,000 government student aid recipients in their first year of post-secondary education (PSE) in 2006 and followed their progress over the next two years.

The first brief finds that among low income college students, visible minority immigrants have a drop-out rate in the first or second year of 17.1 percent, as compared to 25.5 percent (or almost 50 percent higher in relative terms) for non-immigrant, non-“vismin” students. Among university students (where immigrants and vismins are more highly represented) drop-out rates are just 3.8 percent for immigrant vismin students, and 9.6 percent for others, or two and a half times higher.

The authors also find that despite their successes in PSE, visible minorities – whether immigrants or not – are less likely than others to agree that “their faculty is helpful and sympathetic”, and fewer say “their school is a place where they feel they belong”. These results suggest that colleges and universities need to work harder to make these students feel welcome.

The second research brief focuses on how students finance their schooling and finds that immigrants (whether visible minorities or not) are less likely than native-born students to have themselves saved for their PSE, while visible minorities (whether immigrant or not) are more likely than non-visible minorities to have parent who had saved, especially in the case of university students. Among these students (all of whom are government aid recipients) the authors find that non-vismin/non-immigrants report the greatest amounts of government aid and summer employment income – and the most total financing. “PSE financing strategies are clearly different for visible minority and immigrant groups” says Professor Finnie.

Visible minority immigrants, in particular, are consistently more likely than others to be concerned about their student debt. The authors point out that these worries may be due to different expectations regarding future labour market outcomes, different attitudes to debt, or other factors. More than half of all visible minorities say they are going to live with their parents until they can pay back their debt, whereas only just over a quarter of non-visible minorities say the same thing.

The briefs are authored by Ross Finnie, a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and Stephen Childs and Andrew Wismer of the MESA Project. The L-SLIS was an initiative of the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project, a long-run research undertaking funded by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation to evaluate the impact of CMSF Access Bursaries and to explore the relationship between finances, access and persistence in PSE. Further briefs will be released in the next weeks, and additional reports will be published in the coming months.

The two research briefs, Immigrants and Visible Minorities: Post-Secondary Education Experiences and Immigrants and Visible Minorities: Funding Post-Secondary Education, as well as a general guide to the L-SLIS data, are all available online at www.mesa-project.org.