The Impact of Historical Racism on African American College Enrolment Rates from Reconstruction to the Present
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Racial inequality still strongly affects colleges and universities in the American South, particularly those that were historically segregated. This study examines the historical and ongoing impact of institutional racism on African American enrollment at Sam Houston State University (SHSU). This qualitative study draws on historical documents, university archives, and scholarly literature to examine exclusionary admissions, SHSU’s desegregation response, enrollment trends, and lasting institutional erasure. The findings show that although SHSU officially desegregated in 1964, informal policies, institutional silence, and weak structural support continued to limit access and inclusion. Today, many African American students report feeling isolated, fatigued by racial stress, and underrepresented. Initiatives like the ELITE (Establishing Leadership In and Through Education) program and the Race and Reconciliation Project represent efforts to support minority students and acknowledge the university's legacy of exclusion. However, these programs are not enough on their own. Achieving true racial equity at SHSU will require sustained structural reform, inclusive leadership, and a fundamental rethinking of the university's cultural and historical identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".