ETS, Harvard to study progress of diversity at predominantly white colleges

Funded by the WK Kellogg Foundation, the study, aThe Voices of Diversitya will explore the views of minority students, including their accounts of their curricular, co-curricular and social experiences. Students will be asked to describe what, on their campus, has made them feel welcomed, respected, supported and encouraged, and what has made them feel unwelcomed, disrespected, unsupported and discouraged.

The project is funded by a $400,000 grant from the WK Kellogg Foundation of Michigan for the first year and focuses on undergraduate students from four universities. Researchers will interview female and male African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic and American Indian students as well as a limited number of white students as a control group.

“What is unique about this research is that we will assess the progress of diversity on college and university campuses from the students’ perspectives,” says ETS Senior Vice President Michael Nettles of ETS’s Policy Evaluation & Research Center. “We want to learn what factors promote students’ academic and social success and whether that varies depending on their race and sex. This information could help administrators, educators, policymakers, students and their families improve campus environments and student experiences.”

Nettles and his staff will conduct the research with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of Harvard’s WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and Dr. Paula J. Caplan, a Research Associate at the Du Bois Institute and former Professor of Applied Psychology, University of Toronto.