Signs of Diversity’s Benefits
Colleges have long said that having a diverse student body provides educational benefits for all students. The idea is central, for example, to the cases that Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are making in favor of race-conscious admissions before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Broadly, colleges have asserted that students from diverse backgrounds bring different perspectives to classrooms and help all students learn how to get along with others with varying upbringings and experiences. After the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, colleges were allowed to consider race in admissions for the educational benefits provided by diversity but not to remedy past discrimination.
But what does the research say about how a racially diverse student body affects academic performance in college?
A new study adds to the still-emerging body of evidence on the subject, finding that having a higher degree of racial diversity in a yearlong writing class had a positive effect on college students’ grades. The research examined data from a small four-year college, where students are randomly assigned to discussion groups for the required writing courses.
The paper, by Yan Lau, a section chief at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, found that greater racial diversity in the discussion groups resulted in a statistically significant increase in cumulative grade-point averages at graduation and improved the first-year grade-point averages and writing-course grades of female students.
Interestingly, Lau also found that more-diverse classes led white students to be more likely to major in the social sciences, history, and philosophy and less likely to major in literature, language, and arts. Lau hypothesized that white students may be influenced to major in different subjects as a result of “being exposed to worldviews and social networks different from their own when placed in more racially diverse classrooms.”
Lau hypothesized that racial diversity may have had a positive effect on grades because students of different races may help their classmates grow by bringing different skills, knowledge, or experiences to the classroom and because diversity within a class can help expand social networks outside of class.
An earlier study using a similar methodology at a selective, private, Roman Catholic liberal-arts college found more mixed results. The paper, by Angela K. Dills, an economics professor at Western Carolina University, found that Hispanic students with lower SAT scores earned lower grades in classes with greater proportions of Hispanic students, while white students earned slightly higher grades in classes with more Hispanic students. At the college studied, Hispanic students made up about 7 percent of the student body and Black students about 4.5 percent, with white students making up most of the remainder.
Dills said that there is more research on the impacts of racial diversity on academic performance in the K-12 world, in part because it’s harder to find natural variation in the diversity of college students’ peers. In K-12, researchers can look at the impacts of desegregation orders or changes in busing, for example.
Earlier research looking at the broader impacts of racial diversity on college students has found mixed results.
Regarding the academic impacts of racial diversity on college students, Dills said she would like to see more research. “You know, we’d love to see the slam-dunk one way or the other. And I think the research is still evolving,” Dills said. “There’s still a lot more that we could learn.”
Another recent study looking at first-year engineering students at a large, selective engineering school found that an increase in underrepresented minority students improved grades for minority students. The study also found that gender diversity in the classroom improved all students’ likelihood of continuing in engineering, among other findings.
And another paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, looked at the effects of racial diversity in classrooms on Hispanic and African-American students at a California community college. The author found that when underrepresented-minority students were in classes with greater shares of students of their same race, they were more likely to pass the class and more likely to enroll in a course in the same subject in a subsequent term.
Asked what she would say if asked to testify to the Supreme Court about racial diversity and academic performance, Dills hesitated. “I think the research is sort of pointing in a direction, but I don’t know that we know the answer,” she said.
Dills said that most of the research that has been conducted in higher education on that question focuses on rearranging students within a college. “Changing admissions does something a little bit different,” Dills said. “It’s almost certainly going to change the racial and ethnic composition of the campus. But it may also change other kinds of characteristics that matter in the classroom, right? And in ways that are sort of harder to predict. That makes it really complicated.” —Adrienne Lu
