Students on campus desire more diversity, but they’re not as polarized into rival camps, as some would portray them.
On Tuesday, John M. Carey and Yusaki Horiuchi, professors at Dartmouth college, proposed a new method to measure student interest in diversity. Posted on the political science blog The Monkey Cage, then picked up by The Washington Post, results suggested students are in favor of increased diversity in student admissions and teaching staff.
To avoid biased responses from students, Carey and Horiuchi used a technique called fully randomized conjoint analysis, a recent development.
“A respondent is presented with a pair of hypothetical candidates for a position — say, a faculty slot — and asked which one should be appointed,” the professors explained. “Each hypothetical candidate is described with a bundle of attributes that include race/ethnicity and gender identification, but also many others, such as academic discipline, undergraduate and graduate degrees, research record, teaching reputation, rank, and even whether the candidate’s spouse or partner is already on the faculty.”
Each attribute is then assigned and ordered randomly among the candidates to avoid favoring a response from a particular attribute.
“Using the answers of hundreds of respondents and thousands of decisions with the attributes randomized, we can estimate whether, and how much, respondents care about hiring a black candidate rather than a white one, a Latino rather than an Asian American, an engineer rather than an economist, or a candidate with a degree from the University of Georgia rather than one from Yale,” Carey and Horiuchi wrote.
Once the studies were divided evenly to avoid bias, results showed broad support for a diverse demographic among both student admissions and faculty hiring. Specifically, students desired a variety among the student body in regards to socioeconomic status, race, and gender.
“Students preferred an African-American or Native American applicant by 15 percentage points over a white applicant, and a Hispanic or Latino applicant over a white applicant by about 7 percentage points,” the professors noted. “They slightly preferred a woman over a man; strongly preferred a socioeconomically disadvantaged student over the affluent; and a first-generation college applicant over one coming from a family where college has been the norm.”
The desire for diversity was broad.
“No group opposed diversity. White students overall, male students overall, and white males in particular are effectively indifferent to a candidate’s race and gender,” the professors observed.
Although the topic of diversity on college campuses is not a new conversation, the professors’ studies help to spark change in university staff and admission structure, opening doors of opportunity for those that may previously have been denied that privilege.
