Minority Student Attrition Research: Higher Education’s Challenge for Human Resource Development

Abstract

This article addresses higher education’s major challenge for human resource development in the 1990s and beyond—enrolling and retaining to graduation our nation’s racial/ethnic minority students. At the institutional level, this challenge suggests the need for ongoing research and positive intervention. The first section focuses on the interrelationships among human resource development needs, problems associated with the underrepresentation of minorities in higher education, and the subsequent participation of minorities in the skilled labor force. The second section relates these issues to institution-level attrition research as an effective tool with which to more effectively retain students and begin to address the mismatch between future job opportunities and workers’ skill levels. The third section employs the interaction theoretical perspective to warn predominantly White colleges and universities (PWCUs) against basing intervention strategies upon research whose assumptions and recommendations belie the diversity among minority student populations.