Much Research on Campus Diversity Suffers From Being Only Skin Deep, New Studies Suggest; Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/13/10

Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education; Much Research on Campus Diversity Suffers From Being Only Skin Deep, New Studies Suggest:

"A new collection of studies suggests that the success of minority college students and students' perceptions of race relations on their campuses are strongly influenced by factors that actually have little direct connection with ethnicity or race.

Among the studies, all published in the spring issue of New Directions for Institutional Research, is an analysis of University of California student survey data that concludes that students' choice of academic major plays a greater role than their race in determining how much discrimination they perceive on campus. Moreover, having large numbers of racially and culturally sensitive students might paradoxically cause a campus's reputation for tolerance to suffer, because such students are more likely to perceive and report bigotry around them.

Another study, unusual in that it focuses on a campus where white students are outnumbered, concludes that high minority enrollments do not necessarily lead to increased perceptions of tolerance. A third study, examining the educational progress of freshmen at several institutions, concludes that first-generation college students experience some events on the campus differently than do other students. For example, they appear not to reap the same educational gains from out-of-classroom interactions with faculty members as do their peers with at least one college-educated parent, perhaps because the first-generation students may be somewhat rattled and put off by such interactions, which leave their peers feeling more intellectually engaged.

The journal issue, titled Diversity and Educational Benefits, was edited by Serge Herzog, director of institutional analysis at the University of Nevada at Reno, who said in an interview Tuesday that the new studies reinforce his view that much past research on diversity on campuses has been focused on advancing one side of the debate over affirmative action and has lacked a sound empirical basis and an appreciation of the complexities of campus race relations.

Although a wave of other recent studies not included in the new journal issue have taken a similarly nuanced approach to examining campus diversity, Mr. Herzog said much more such work needs to be done to ensure that colleges' policies are grounded in sound research.

"Clearly, defining diversity strictly around ethnicity or race fails to capture the multidimensionality of the concept," Mr. Herzog writes in an article in the journal summarizing the studies it presents. Other student attributes that also contribute to campus diversity, he writes, "play a significant role in shaping both the academic and the social experience of students," and assessments of the educational benefits of diversity "may significantly vary with the type of data used.""

http://chronicle.com/article/Much-Research-on-Campus-Div/65051/