More Students Don’t Identify Racial/Ethnic Background on Applications, Says Study
WASHINGTON
A new report, “‘Unknown’ Students on College Campuses: An Exploratory Analysis,” was released today by The James Irvine Foundation. Authors of this study explore the dramatic increase in the percentage of college students who do not identify their racial/ethnic background on college admissions forms. Their study examined this group of students at three private California colleges and found that a sizeable portion of them are White. Another large group are multiracial students who select “White” as part of their racial/ethnic identification. The report was released as part of The James Irvine Foundation Campus Diversity Initiative (CDI), coordinated by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the Claremont Graduate University (CGU).
“We are pleased to have supported the twenty-eight campuses in the Campus Diversity Initiative to increase the success of underrepresented students in higher education in California,” said James Canales, president & chief executive officer of The James Irvine Foundation. “The results of this particular study should support efforts to more effectively monitor and describe campus change with regard to diversity over time.”
The authors, researchers from AAC&U and CGU, examined two independent data sets. The first set, admissions data, was converted into enrollment data upon students’ acceptance and matriculation into college. The second set, CIRP (Cooperative Institutional Research Program) Freshman Survey data, was gathered after the students were on campus.
While the authors could not compare data at the level of individual students, they found that comparing students by racial/ethnic group across the two data sets yielded important information, especially if the campus experienced high response rates on the CIRP. With one such campus in the study, for example, enrollment data indicated White students to be 42% of the total entering cohort, while CIRP data showed White students to comprise between 57% and 70% of this same cohort.
“While this study is exploratory, it is a big first step in isolating and addressing the problems associated with how campuses and the federal government track the racial/ethnic background of today’s college students,” said AAC&U president, Carol Geary Schneider. “Given what we now know about the educational value of diverse learning environments, it is more important than ever that we have an accurate picture of student diversity on our college campuses. We need to attend to the growing number of students who don’t identify their racial/ethnic background on admissions forms. We cannot rely on anecdotes about these students or on assumptions that they are all multiracial, especially at schools with highly competitive admissions.”
