Promoting Critical Consciousness, Academic Performance, and Persistence Among Graduate Students Experiencing Class-Based Oppression

Despite providing valuable intellectual labor to universities, graduate students experience oppression based on social class (e.g., underpaid labor, student debt, barriers to unionizing), which is compounded for graduate students who hold minoritized statuses (i.e., students of color, sexual minoritized students). Minimal research has focused on graduate student academic persistence and performance in this context. Critical consciousness (CC) has been shown to improve the development of political agency that enables socially oppressed students to persist against systemic barriers. The current study adopts a structural equation modeling (SEM) path model that integrates CC and social cognitive career theory (SCCT) with a racially and ethnically diverse and low-income sample of graduate students (N = 159) to better understand how CC is involved in promoting academic performance and graduate student persistence. Analyses involved examining direct and indirect effects models. Results supported the fit of the model among graduate students, and suggested that higher critical activism predicted higher political self-efficacy, while greater critical reflection predicted greater political outcome expectations, which in turn predicted higher intent to persist and academic performance. These results suggest that integrating CC and SCCT is appropriate for understanding how to improve academic outcomes for low-income graduate students. Results suggest that the model integrating critical consciousness and SCCT is appropriate in predicting outcomes for students who face oppression based on socioeconomic status, including students holding other minoritized identities based on race and ethnicity. Implications for future research and practice aiming to promote equity in graduate education are discussed.