Pathways of Black immigrant youth in Québec from secondary school to university: Cumulative racial disadvantage and compensatory advantage of resilience

Abstract

This article analyzes the educational pathways of Black Canadian immigrant students in Québec with Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean backgrounds. Both racialized groups have been targets of educational and social discrimination and segregation, which compromise their educational pathways. The results obtained from the longitudinal data however, show that some of these students are able to overcome such obstacles.Although they are more susceptible to experiencing major academic difficulties and lag due to grade repetition, and less likely to attend private institutions or to be admitted to enriched programs in public schools, these students have access to college in a proportion comparable to that of their peers whose parents are nonimmigrants. This supports the hypothesis of resilience put forward by some authors such as Krahn and Taylor (2005) regarding Canadian students from Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean immigrant families. However, the situation is somewhat reversed with regard to obtaining a college diploma and access to university. They are less likely to have entered university and obtained aThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.