Diversity diagnostics
Click for assistance with a diagnosis for the following conditions:
- The retention rate of your underrepresented minority students (URMs) is at least 10% lower than that of majority students.
- The percentage of URMs is less than 15% of your enrollment.
- You recently have had a crisis over racial issues.
- URMs and women are leaving the sciences at notably higher rates than white and Asian males. [COMING SOON.]
- You are having trouble creating cross-cultural, multicultural courses. [COMING SOON.]
- Segregated or integrated residential housing is a difficult decision.
- You would like to review the research on value of diversity. [COMING SOON.]
- You would like to review some well-formulated multicultural goal statements. [COMING SOON.]
- You would like to view several model administrative structures. [COMING SOON.]
- You have not surveyed your racial climate recently.
If you would like to comment on the above diagnostics or request additional categories, please let us know.
Last updated: 19 May 2004.
1. The retention rate of your underrepresented minority students ( URMs) is at least 10% lower than that of majority students.
If the retention rate of URM students is significantly less than for other students then your institution has a problem.
It could be that the admissions processes are at fault (more on that under item three). However, it is more likely that there are a number of internal factors that are causing minority students to underachieve and/or dropout.
Is your multicultural center serving student needs effectively? Is it under-staffed, or are they offering the needed counseling and support? How do you know? Have there been institutional assessments regarding student satisfaction of campus services, or assessments on campus climate with regard to racism? Are you aware of the assessment results and recommendations? Are the tutoring programs (especially for students studying math and science) shorthanded or nonexistent? Are there programs linking students of color with specific faculty or administrative mentors?
Programs aimed at academic achievement: Are you familiar with the Emerging Scholars program at UT Austin? This is a wonderful story of American education: When teaching mathematics at Berkeley, Professor Uri Treisman noticed that his Asian and Asian-American students were significantly outperforming his African American students. Treisman went to the registrar's office and found that the student entrance exam scores from the different groups were comparable.
As it is difficult to get into Berkeley and even more difficult to get into the math department, Treisman realized that despite the performance gap, he clearly had two very able student groups. He then decided to review and compare how African American and Asian/Asian-American students studied.
Treisman discovered that the Asian students first studied separately and then gathered together to talk about the points that were troublesome. These students then broke up and went back to studying separately -- but after another hour or so they gathered again to discuss their problems as a group.
By contrast, when Treisman followed the African American students, he found that these students were 'lone rangers' -- that is, they always studied alone. Therefore, Treisman called the African American students together and explained to them how the Asian/Asian-American students studied. The African American students agreed to try studying math in the same manner as the Asian American students: with group study and discussion techniques. After studying using these techniques, the African American student grades shot up dramatically.
[For a complete report on Treisman's work, please see: Treisman, U. (1992). "Studying students studying Calculus: A look at the lives of minority mathematics students in college." College Mathematics Journal, 23, 362-372.]
Treisman has since moved to UT Austin where he now holds a distinguished chair in mathematics. At UT, he opened the Emerging Scholars Program. When students sign on, they agree to participate in 8 hours of tutoring and support services a week. The results have been as dramatic as those at Berkeley. Participating students have higher grade averages (by a point), and a far higher rate of retention in mathematics and the sciences, as well as a higher graduation rate than students in general. Fortunately, the Treisman model, which is the model of the Emerging Scholar Center now directed by Efraim Armendariz, has been adopted by over 150 national colleges and universities.
Every institution with a lower success rate among its URM students should investigate the Emerging Scholars option. Other schools that have adopted the plan in addition to UT Austin and UC Berkeley, where it was developed, include Occidental College and Northwestern University.
Furthermore, Rice University has a similar program for students in computer sciences and mathematics known as, "Spend a Summer with a Scientist" (SaS) directed by Dr. Richard Tapia. Dr. Tapia began the SaS program in 1989 with the ultimate goal of increasing the number of underrepresented students in mathematics, engineering, and the computational sciences.
His intent was to give these students experience in academic research that would help them gain confidence in their research skills with the hope that they would attend graduate school. By 1992, the focus of the program shifted to address retention of Rice URM graduate students.
By 1995, Tapia included white female participants, and now the program consists of a multiple year summer research experience, mixing Rice graduate students with undergraduates from all over the U.S. Students are encouraged to return each summer, moving from undergraduate to graduate science work within the same research community.
We have been in contact with each of these institutions, they would welcome your questions will send you materials about their efforts and documenting their successes. These have been extremely effective programs; while implementing them does take some effort, the rewards are substantial.
Is the multicultural climate at your institution supportive of minority students? Both faculty and student support is fundamental to good achievement and a high graduation rate among minority students. More on this under item four.
Institutions must assume the responsibility for poor minority students' achievement and low graduation rates. These can be improved markedly through institutional efforts.
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2. The percentage of URMs is less than 15% of your enrollment.
There are many great examples of institutions, even those not located in high-density minority areas, that are successful recruiting and enrolling minority students; thus, it is difficult to justify having small URM numbers.
The evidence of the need for a highly educated minority cadre in the country is so obvious it hardly needs justification. America is the most diverse country in the history of mankind. We have more citizens of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, more languages are spoken, and more religions are represented than any place on the globe.
We know how disastrous these differences have been in virtually all countries, and if we are going to make our country thrive we must seek every possible method for giving every member of this society the strategies for success.
Our most effective instrument to do so is education--specifically higher education. Lester Thurow, economist, Professor, and Dean at MIT stated that every person graduating from high school needs additional training to become a contributing member of the American workplace. Outsourcing and off-shoring puts pressure on the young to pursue all educational opportunities possible. We simply must do our best to see that all peoples of this nation have an opportunity for higher education. Recruiting works; here are some examples.
Amherst sends out a team to the high URM population centers of the country, and makes contact with all the inner-city schools they visit. They interview students, they call every student they met when they get back to the campus, and they cover the cost of students visiting them in Amherst.
Is it expensive? Yes in a way, but to Amherst, in the long run the cost is worth the effort. Amherst is reaching out to create productive and contributing members of society.
We know that African Americans who are college educated get more involved in their communities on the average than do White graduates. The celebrated book, The Shape of the River by Bowen and Bok, provides overwhelmingly powerful statistics that African American students who attend selective colleges continue their education in professional schools. They do so in relatively large numbers and contribute to their professions, as well as to the civic culture in remarkable ways.
The Posse Program provides another example of how minority students can actively be recruited. They select students from inner-city schools whose credentials would simply not permit them to pass though admissions portals but who after a DAP (a dynamic assessment process interview) are found to have great leadership capability.
Those students selected are then sent to a college as a group or posse of 10 or so. The posse provides the support (as well as weekly programmatic meetings run by 'posse mentors'), which has been found to be necessary to help these students thrive in college.
The graduation rate of posse students--students who normally couldn't meet the admissions criteria--is an impressive 87%. Any college or university can invite work with the Posse Program and increase their student diversity with substantial success with students who not only do well academically but who are actively engaged in the life of the college.
The Posse Program is a splendid way to start if your numbers are low.
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3. You recently have had a crisis over racial issues.
For all of the apparent good will we try to create on campus, crises do happen.
At times, as we were conducting our visits to schools, we almost felt that a rain cloud preceded our visits. There were crises at Brown, MIT, Swarthmore, and at Wellesley, just to name a few schools. In fact, we were quite surprised when we visited a school that had not had some sort of recent crisis.
While every effort needs to be made to create a multicultural climate where racial/ethnic tensions are low or nonexistent; such occasionally can't always be avoided. The fallout is not brief, nor the effect trivial, but when such crises do happen there are actions to take to minimize the damage.
Get immediately on top of the situation. Unlike many administrative problems, racial incidents simply don't go away.
Be honest and transparent with the facts, meet with all campus constituents repeatedly, and continue with discussion and action/education to prevent further incidents.
Promise to do what you probably should have done before, and then carry out your promises with style: everybody will remember if you do it well and fault you if you don't.
Most schools have a crisis intervention protocol to follow; however a very few schools have a crisis prevention model that strengthens the educational message about the value of diversity to all campus members, alumni, and campus board members.
Tommy Lee Woon, formerly the multicultural educator at Stanford University and now the Associate Dean of the Office of Pluralism and Leadership (in Student Affairs) at Dartmouth College, has such a prevention protocol. Furthermore, Dean Woon's protocol is part of Dartmouth's new anti-bias prevention, early detection and rapid response network.
If you don't have such a protocol in place, and everyone should, Dean Woon's example is a great place to start.
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4. URMs and women are leaving the sciences at notably higher rates than white and Asian males.
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5. You are having trouble creating cross-cultural, multicultural courses.
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6. Segregated or integrated residential housing is a difficult decision.
Whether housing should be ethnically separated or integrated is a complex issue.
Many URM students with whom we have had such conversations felt they needed a bit of space of their own. While that space could include some white students, the percentage of themed group of the residence needs to remain larger than the incoming mixed group, or there becomes a loss of the essence of community the original theme was designed to address.
The shift, for example, that has taken place in some of the student housing at Berkeley illustrates this concern. One of the new dorms was designated as an African American themed house, and subsequently it was opened to a few white students.
At first, the white students who moved in were well accepted and quite compatible with the black norms. White students found that they enjoyed the accommodations of the house and kept increasing in number. Over a few years the house became dominated by white students. The black students with whom we spoke felt this was a great loss.
Chocolate City at MIT is fraternity alternative, which African American and Afro-Caribbean men have found to be particularly supportive. Chocolate City is a fraternity residence for 28 men of African American, Caribbean or mixed descent which has a high community service/social justice component. Residents describe it as one of the few places on campus where they can completely relax. From our MIT focus group, URM students talked about Chocolate City as being a real center and support for social as well as civic events.
Stanford University has a very strong residential education component that incorporates multicultural co-curricular programming under the direction of the Multicultural Educator. This educator trains staff, students, alumni, and even board members around the benefits of a diverse campus and how to make such a campus a place where everyone can thrive.
As a result, Stanford has a number of theme houses, but the African American, Asian American, Native American and Latino houses (i.e., Ujamaa, Okada, Muwekma, and Casa Zapata) each have a requirement in which fifty percent of students in the house must be from the theme group, and fifty percent are a mix of other students.
Students from Stanford describe both the housing and programming as integral to the success of the university's diversity initiatives. The Stanford students from our focus groups were among the most satisfied with their diversity initiatives and with the cross-cultural interaction on campus of all the colleges we visited.
Our observations suggest that the best alternatives are ones that provide both integrated and separated space--times to be together and times to be with others of your race. These, however, don't necessarily have to be living spaces. The options of roommate choice often mitigate the need for separate space if the alternatives are limited.
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7. You would like to review the research on value of diversity.
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8. You would like to review some well-formulated multicultural goal statements.
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9. You would like to view several model administrative structures.
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10. You have not surveyed your racial climate recently.
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If you would like to comment on the above diagnostics or request additional categories, please let us know. |
