District Boundaries Affect Racial Representation at Michigan Community Colleges

It has long been recognized that Black and Latinx students are underrepresented at America's top public universities and thus deprived of access to the institutions with the best graduation rates and career outcomes. Much less understood is whether these students at least have equitable access to their local community colleges, which are supposed to be where all students can access affordable higher education. In many states, community colleges are intended to serve a specific district that may not reflect a neat radius surrounding their campuses, and there is no data source that makes these attendance zone boundaries readily available for all states. Disparities in representation should raise red flags. Overrepresentation of Black students and the corresponding underrepresentation of white students are problems if colleges are not receiving enough resources to achieve desired outcomes. Many factors might explain the nuances of any one college's enrollment demographics, and different methodologies may contribute to the appearance of overrepresentation or underrepresentation. This issue brief highlights the case of Henry Ford College to demonstrate the uniqueness of community colleges' local characteristics and the sensitivity of measures of representation to the way that attendance zones are analyzed. It should serve as a guidepost for future researchers and policymakers to better judge whether community colleges are truly representative of their communities.