Professors research diversity

A group of University professors has finished collecting data from the Campus Life in America Student Survey (CLASS), launched last year to explore the issue of racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses. The survey results, based on 12,000 responses from students across the country, will be used to inform college administrators on ways to improve undergraduates' experiences with diversity.

The survey was sent out to 30,000 freshmen and juniors randomly selected from Emory University, Michigan State University, Portland State University, Princeton, UCLA and the University of Miami.

Preliminary results will be released by the end of the spring semester.

"From the beginning, it was conceived as a project that we would do at Princeton but would involve other schools as well," said University psychology professor Joan Girgus, a researcher for CLASS.

Sociology professor Thomas Espenshade, also a researcher for the project, said the other five participating schools were chosen because of their diversity.

"These schools were picked deliberately to try to maximize variation," Espenshade said. "We wanted to have, for example, some large and small schools, public and private [schools] ... and geographic diversity. Most importantly, we wanted to have some variation in terms of their racial makeup."

Together, the six schools aim to answer three questions involving diversity on college campuses: how engaged undergraduates are in diversity-related experiences, how satisfied they are with those experiences and what administrators can do to maximize the educational benefits of diversity.

"The goals are to see if we can look at the behaviors and attitudes undergraduates have about racial and ethnic diversity and look at whether they are related to policies, practices and programs that universities provide in this area," Girgus said. "We want to know what makes a difference in terms of the educational benefits of diversity."

While this is the second year of the CLASS project, there has not yet been an analysis of the data. "Much of our effort has been assembling this data set," Espenshade said.

"Over the next weeks and months we're going to be turning our attention to an analysis of the data," he added.

The group's next priority is to get more funding, Girgus said.

Currently, the project is in the second year of a two-year grant, funded by the Ford Foundation of New York. It was originally slated to last five years.

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If they receive additional funding, the CLASS research group plans to "go back to the same 12,000 students to ask them a lot of the same questions and see if their responses have changed," Girgus said. "We would also like to extend the project to a higher number of schools."

The project's expansion hinges on the availability of resources.

"Our ultimate goal is to see if we can come up with the best practices for university administrators ... Our plans at this point are dependent on further funding," Girgus said.