A new wave of research on campus diversity holds the promise of improving how colleges serve students of different hues. On the fundamental question of whether racial and ethnic diversity produces educational benefits, the latest studies’ bottom line is: Sometimes. With the right mix of students. If handled delicately.
The increased nuance and complexity of the recent research is seen as a byproduct of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling, in which a slim majority accepted the University of Michigan Law School’s argument that the educational benefits arising from campus diversity justified the use of race-conscious admissions.
In putting to rest courtroom debates over the constitutionality of such policies, the Grutter decision left proponents of affirmative action feeling freer to study—and publicly acknowledge—shortcomings in colleges’ efforts to promote diversity. Colleges have interpreted the ruling as requiring them to demonstrate how race-conscious admissions policies advance their missions. That, in turn, has created demand for research on the nuts and bolts of using diversity to improve education.
Whether the latest studies will sway the debate over affirmative action remains unclear, especially given that their conclusions are mixed enough to offer ammunition to both sides. But both proponents and critics of affirmative action say the new research provides colleges something of immediate and practical value: Guidance on how to tweak their policies to maximize educational benefits and minimize harm.
“You can’t just bring together a group of racially diverse people and assume that there will be benefits that come from that,” says Jeffrey F. Milem, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona. “That is an important first step, but it cannot be the only step colleges take.”
Daryl G. Smith, a professor of education and psychology at Claremont Graduate University who closely tracks such research, says many of the latest studies reveal key differences in how various racial and ethnic groups interact and show how colleges’ policies influence whether—and what—students learn from one another. “The conditions under which you bring people together matter,” she says.
‘Mixing and Mingling’
Among the latest studies is a soon-to-be-published paper by two Duke University scholars—Peter Arcidiacono, an associate professor of economics, and Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor of public policy and economics—suggesting that colleges interested in promoting educational diversity face a Catch-22: If they relax admissions standards to take in more black and Hispanic students, their white and Asian-American students are much less likely to reap educational benefits, at least as measured by their acquisition of diversity-related skills assumed to increase long-term earning potential.
On the whole, the study, slated for publication in the journal Economic Inquiry, found only weak evidence that the racial composition of a college’s student body has a long-term impact on the success of white and Asian-American students in the areas it measured. And where colleges enrolled black and Hispanic students whose academic credentials were lower, on average, than those of other students, the effect of diversity on the success of white and Asian-American students appeared, if anything, to be negative.
The Duke researchers based their analysis on data on the graduates of 30 selective colleges gathered through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s “College and Beyond” study. Considering that the subject population enrolled in college in 1976, Mitchell J. Chang, a professor of higher education at the University of California at Los Angeles, questions whether the findings are relevant today. “It was a different period,” he says, and the colleges in question had “little diversity to speak of.”
Another yet-unpublished study, by Victor B. Saenz, an assistant professor of higher-education administration at the University of Texas at Austin, finds that college students who come from segregated environments are less open than others to interactions with students of different races. It also finds, however, that colleges can help students transcend segregated backgrounds by encouraging positive interactions among racial and ethnic groups both in and out of class. Mr. Saenz based his analysis, which has been accepted for publication in The Review of Higher Education, on survey data on about 4,700 college students from nine public research universities collected by the Preparing College Students for a Diverse Democracy Project, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
A new book by Thomas J. Espenshade, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, and Alexandria Walton Radford, a research associate at MPR Associates Inc., a consulting firm in Washington that specializes in education, suggests that students’ willingness to interact with members of other races is partially a function of their social class, with students from wealthy families generally having less interaction with nonwhite students than those from humbler backgrounds do.
The book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (Princeton University Press), also says that whether students report benefiting from crossracial interactions depends heavily on what those interactions are. Students with freshman-year roommates from different racial backgrounds, for example, are much more likely than others to have crossracial interactions later during college. Casual contact and superficial exchanges appear to have little impact on students’ thinking.
“Diversity work does not begin or end with the admission office,” says Mr. Espenshade, who based his analysis on data on 9,000 students at 10 selective colleges collected through the National Survey of College Experience. At most colleges, he says, “there is not enough attention paid to relevant issues of mixing or mingling.”
Arthur L. Coleman, a lawyer who has extensively advised colleges on their diversity efforts and now is a managing partner at EducationCounsel, a policy and law consulting organization, says he has seen an uptick in efforts by colleges to measure the success of their own diversity-related policies and by professional associations to study how collegiate exposure to diversity influences people in their fields.
Smudged Battle Lines
In the period leading to the Grutter decision, researchers had been focused on the basic question of whether diversity produced any educational benefits, because the courts’ view of the legality of race-conscious admission policies appeared to hinge on the answer.
“There was a rush to get stuff out quickly,” says Mr. Milem, of Arizona, who helped generate research used by proponents of affirmative action to make their case. “The lawyers did not want the nuance. They said, ‘Show us what the outcomes are.’ They pushed us to sort of talk in better, shorter sound bites because that is the way it needs to be communicated.”
The debate over the persuasiveness of research on this point has remained very much alive in the years since Grutter. In an article published in the Stanford Law Review in 2006, for example, Justin Pidot, who was then a third-year Stanford law student and now is a Justice Department lawyer, reviewed the research that had been before the Supreme Court in 2003 and found it inconclusive on the key question of whether colleges must maintain minority enrollments above certain levels to achieve educational benefits.
Sandra Day O’Connor, the now-retired associate justice who wrote the majority opinion in the 5-to-4 Grutter decision, argues the need for yet more research on the educational benefits of diversity in an essay in a new book, The Next 25 Years: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa.
But the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold race-conscious admissions in Grutter left advocates of affirmative action feeling they had won the battle, at least for the time being.
Richard H. Sander, a law professor at UCLA who has produced research critical of race-conscious admissions, says “increasing room for honest discussion” has made it “easier for reasonable people in the middle to enter this debate without facing withering crossfire from both sides.”
One indicator of the newfound openness is that some scholars are frankly discussing findings that contradict their own assumptions.
For example, James Sidanius, a professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard University, acknowledges in a book published just over a year ago that a long-term study of about 2,000 students at UCLA failed to confirm his belief that the university’s diversity and efforts to promote multiculturalism had a profound effect on students’ attitudes toward members of other racial and ethnic groups.
The book, The Diversity Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the College Campus, written by Mr. Sidanius and three other scholars, also says the UCLA study found not only that some black students’ grades had suffered from their belief that they were admitted through race-conscious admissions policies, but also that involvement in racially or ethnically oriented campus groups appeared to hurt students’ ability to relate to peers from other racial and ethnic backgrounds. Rather than being challenged by advocates for minority students, the study has been praised by several as solid.
Many other studies of diversity are under way. Among them is an effort by a collaborative of colleges based at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to measure the educational impact of “intergroup dialogue,” a teaching approach that brings students from different backgrounds together and encourages them to grapple with points of conflict. On another front, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA is developing a national survey of colleges to measure students’ experiences with diversity and how they are affected.
Ms. Smith, of the Claremont Graduate University, says, “The issue in this research should not be to demonstrate that we want diversity or don’t want diversity. The issue today should be: How do we go about building a healthy democracy in our institutions, building pluralistic communities that work?”
