Racial diversity on college campuses benefits students, says sociologist

A new study by sociologist Mary Fischer supports the view that colleges with diverse student bodies are places where students find new friends from other racial and ethnic groups.

The change in friendship networks is particularly strong for white students on the most diverse campuses, who often come to college from backgrounds where they had little exposure to non-whites.

Her findings, published in the September 2008 issue of the Social Science Quarterly, document what some have predicted about the benefits of greater diversity on campus.

The results of the study will likely add to the debate surrounding affirmative action, says Fischer, assistant professor of sociology and an affiliate of the Center for Population Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

“It shows that interracial contact is an incredibly useful outcome from a college experience,” she says.

While it may seem natural that greater diversity would lead to more interracial friendships, there have been concerns that more diversity would lead to self-segregation, with each racial or ethnic group keeping to itself.

In fact, Fischer’s study did show that black students had a high number of friendships within their own group, considering that they were a minority on the campuses surveyed and were surrounded by non-blacks.

However, in the schools with greater diversity, students from all racial and ethnic groups came to have more diverse friendship networks. This effect was particularly strong for white students.

Her study is the first to examine the effects of diversity at such a large number of college campuses and to include Asians and Hispanics as well as blacks and whites.

The study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, which covered 28 college and university campuses and surveyed 4,000 white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students.

Among the campuses surveyed were large public universities and small liberal arts colleges, including Tulane, the University of California at Berkeley, Kenyon College, Washington University, Yale, Wesleyan, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, Oberlin, Emory, the University of North Carolina, and Penn State.

The survey was commissioned in 1999 by investigators at the University of Pennsylvania, where Fischer received her Ph.D. in sociology and demography in 2003. Fischer was the project manager for the survey, which was conducted by Temple University’s survey research center. The data are now housed at Princeton University.

The survey questioned freshmen in the fall and spring, and included waves of data collection over four years on topics that included college choice, majors, career plans, living arrangements, grades earned, and social relationships.

Data from the survey have been used for various sociological studies, some reported earlier. Fischer was co-author of a book published in 2002, Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities, which used survey data to analyze why African American and Latino students did not perform as well as whites and Asians at elite colleges.

Fischer’s diversity study excluded data from one of the surveyed schools, Howard University, a historically black institution that by definition had a less diverse student body.