Effort stems from landmark 2003 Supreme Court affirmative-action ruling
By: David Campbell
In a 2003 ruling on the University of Michigan’s affirmative-action policies, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the principal that a diverse student population creates educational benefits.
In a new study now under way, researchers at Princeton University along with five other universities across the country are putting this idea to the test.
The project is called the Campus Life in America Student Survey CLASS and is being funded with a two-year grant from the Ford Foundation.
The objective is to see what can be learned about the educational benefits of diversity on campuses, said Princeton Psychology Professor Joan Girgus, one of the investigators.
In the fall of 2004, Web-based surveys were sent out to 30,000 freshmen and juniors at Princeton, the University of Miami, Michigan State University, Emory University, Portland State University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Researchers are now analyzing data collected from the 12,000 students who responded, as well as from interviews with more than 100 administrators at the six institutions, who provided information on their diversity policies and programs, and quantitative data about their student bodies, Professor Girgus continued.
Initial findings of the study are expected to be released later this year.
In the meantime, she said, researchers are seeking additional funding to follow up on these 12,000 students a year and a half after the first survey to track their experiences and possible changes in attitudes with regard to diversity, and to broaden the number of institutions included in the study.
"Our goal is to help colleges and universities know more about what the best practices may be in this area," Professor Girgus said.
She said the universities now included in the study were selected for their differences in size, in whether they were public or private institutions, geographic differences, and differences in ethnic and racial compositions.
Similarly, an even mix of freshmen and juniors were polled to gather data from students just entering college, as well as from undergraduates who have been in school for a while.
"We’re looking at the kinds of experiences with racial and ethnic diversity that undergraduates have, the attitudes they’ve had, and what the policies and programs at the colleges they attend have provided," Professor Girgus said.
If the study can be broadened, as hoped, she said, researchers intend to track any correlation between changes in student attitudes and diversity-related policies and programs information that could then be used to guide future policymaking.
Princeton Sociology Professor Thomas Espenshade, another researcher with the study, said that while it is still early in the process of analyzing the data, many freshmen respondents said students should take responsibility to improve the climate on campus in terms of diversity and relationships between students of different backgrounds.
But juniors were more likely than freshmen to place that responsibility with university administrators, he continued. And fewer juniors than freshmen responded that they were aware of specific programs to promote diversity at their schools.
"We’d like to gain some insight into the differences in their responses and what they may indicate in terms of the students’ perceptions of their institutions’ commitment to diversity," Professor Espenshade said.
He said the researchers’ hope is to learn how a diverse educational environment helps to shape students’ behaviors, attitudes and perceptions.
"We’d also like to know what colleges and universities can do from a policy or programmatic standpoint to maximize the educational benefits of diversity," he said.