An Investigation of Ethnic Difference Among Students in Transition Programs in Relation to Self-Efficacy at a Southwestern Regional University

The current study focuses on undergraduate students at a mid-sized regional doctoral-granting four-year public university in the Southwestern United States. We compared the self-efficacy of students of different ethnicities who participated in college transition programs to those who did not. Transition programs in this study consisted of three transition programs (Program S, Program B, and Program R) that model the framework of Summer Bridge Programs; they target students who have just graduated high school and plan to enroll in college. Such programs share common programmatic features such as course enrollment, exposure to campus resources, peer engagement, and mentorship. Using an ex post facto design to investigate the relations, we assessed participants’ self-efficacy using the College Self-Efficacy Inventory (Solberg et al., 1993). It was found that Hispanic/Latino students who joined one of the transition programs had higher levels of self-efficacy than their non-transition program peers; whereas White/Caucasian and Black/African American participants did not have higher levels of self-efficacy than their non-transition program peers.