There’s a lot of meat in the 2014 High School Benchmarks Study from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and I encourage you to dive in yourself. I’m just digging into it now. I want to flag something fairly simple: in terms of both college enrollment rates immediately following high school graduation and the crucial question of first-to-second year persistence, income level is more important than high- or low-minority status across all three identified locales (urban, suburban, and rural).
In all sectors, the gap between low- and high-minority schools is smaller than the gap between comparable low- and high-income schools, when it comes to immediate post-high school college enrollment.
Persistence rate from first to second year, which is just as important or more than enrollment rate, follows a similar pattern. Again, in most sectors the gap between low- and high-minority schools is smaller than the gap between low-income and high-income schools. And in all sectors, high-minority, high-income schools  outperform low-income, low-minority schools. When it comes to early college enrollment and success, the income gap is more powerful than the racial achievement gap. But because students from racial minorities have lower average parental incomes than white students, enrollment and persistence for racial minorities is depressed. Further, because college attendance is strongly predictive of adult unemployment and income level, the racial income gap is self-perpetuating: lower parental incomes keep black and Hispanic students out of college, and those students go on to have lower incomes as parents, keeping their children out of college. The need for a redistributive approach to solving this gap is clear.
Other tidbits:
1. There is essentially no differences in performance between high-minority schools across locales. There are large gaps, however, between low-minority schools across locales. Among high-income low minority schools, rural schools perform far worse than their urban and suburban counterparts. And the gap between low-income, low-minority urban schools and low-income, low-minority rural schools is a huge 11% in first-year enrollment and 6% in retention.
2. At the lower income level, high-minority schools outperform their low-minority counterparts in the suburban and rural locales. In fact, poor, predominantly white schools in rural areas do as badly or worse than any other segment. In the cities, low-minority schools enjoy significant advantages over their high-minority counterparts.
3. These data point to a general reality of American education and inequality: failure is concentrated among poor minority students in cities and poor white students in rural areas. Meanwhile, rich students in cities and suburbs do well regardless of racial background, with white, rich, urban kids developing a large advantage over the rest of the country.