Failure to thrive: A QuantCrit analysis of academic failure and everyday discrimination in undergraduate nursing...

Academic failure in nursing education is frequently framed as a student deficit, detached from the structural and institutional forces that shape educational outcomes. This framing obscures how racism, bias, and exclusionary evaluation practices influence who fails-and under what conditions.

This study examines the relationship between everyday discrimination and academic failure in undergraduate nursing education, using a Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit) lens to foreground identity as a site of structural vulnerability.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 256 undergraduate nursing students at a Canadian university. Descriptive analyses, chi-square tests, t-tests, and logistic regression models were used to examine associations between everyday discrimination, academic failure, and social identity.

Students who reported academic failure had higher levels of perceived everyday discrimination. Academic failure was more common among racialized students (54.4 %) compared to non-racialized students (38.5 %). The interaction of race and gender revealed that racialized women had over seven times the odds of academic failure compared to non-racialized men. Skills-based assessments were the most common site of reported failure.

These findings challenge the notion that student failure is solely due to deficits. Instead, they suggest that structural inequalities, particularly those based on race and gender, significantly impact academic outcomes. A QuantCrit perspective redefines failure as a consequence of institutional structures and power dynamics, influencing evaluation practices, faculty development, and equity accountability in nursing education.