Profiles of Undergraduate Completers: Deconstructing the Heterogeneity

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.