Also as in the Cohen research, they were followed all the way through high school. The results were presented in three reports— the first published in 2016 and the last in 2021. This research, too, found that the self-affirmation intervention, in its first year, significantly improved the academic performance of Black and Hispanic students in schools where they were lower in number and in level of achievement— precisely the conditions in which their identity threat would be greatest. And again, this effect lasted. From the seventh grade through the last year of high school, the racial achievement gap for affirmed students grew 50 percent less each year than the gap for non-affirmed students. The achievement gap between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students had decreased by 42 percent by the end of high school. And the intervention increased the percentage of minority students eventually graduation from high school on time by 10 percentage points. All of this from a twenty-minute affirmation exercise in the seventh grade! It launched a process of ever-increasing engagement with school that lifted these students’ trajectories of achievement.

But Black students have lived with their racial identity. They know it can matter. They didn’t know that it would matter in this instance. But they knew it could. Thus their predicament. To be safe, not to be misled, they were less trusting. They stayed in churn.

Such caution has its costs. There could be value in that feedback. It might help them with their essay and their writing generally. Trusting less means they’d miss out on that benefit. And this would happen over and over in a diverse school.

7. Making Institutions Wise

“What does it take to succeed here?” I was genuinely confused— in a cloud of ambiguity. And, as one of only eight African Americans in a student body of nine hundred or so at the time, that ambiguity had a certain toxicity: Like Mirna on the trail, I worried that how people saw my race could affect how they saw and treated me. I couldn’t rule out that possibility. I was knee-deep in churn.

A ten-member University Innovation Alliance has committed to exploring its data-driven strategies. Also, GSU has its own National Institute for Student Success, headed by Renick, that helps regional public universities use this approach. As the degree of implementation progresses in these schools, graduation rates have increased, sometimes drastically so, especially for low-income and minority students. And there is another sector of American higher education that, in taking a more developmental approach to its students, has long used its own versions of GSU-type supports: historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen tested the effect of a similar intervention at the college level. They exposed freshmen to a persuasive message that presented the social stresses of college life as transient and as something everyone experiences. This message improved Black students’ grades over their next three years in college when compared to Black students who didn’t get this message. How did it do this? Further analysis showed that it helped Black students see college stress as something not peculiar to their identity. It reduced their identity threat. They could trust their environment more— churn less— and their grades reflected it.