Experiencing diversity: what can we learn from liberal arts colleges?

Liberal Education, Wntr, 2005 by George D. Kuh, Paul D. Umbach

IN MANY WAYS, liberal arts colleges seem uniquely well suited to provide high quality undergraduate experiences. Their relatively small size ostensibly promotes student-faculty interaction and meaningful relations with peers. Many have salient missions--some because of denominational roots, others because of curricular arrangements--that are thought to leave distinctive imprints on their students' attitudes and values (Clark 1970; Kuh et al. 1991; Townsend, Newell, and Wiese 1992). According to Richard Hersh (1999, 192) these structural and cultural features make liberal arts colleges "sui generis, themselves a special kind of pedagogy." That is, they emphasize a range of intellectual and practical knowledge, skills, and competencies and create the conditions inside and outside the classroom that help students integrate and bring coherence to their learning. This is supported by some pretty convincing empirical evidence. Decades of studies show that residential liberal arts colleges "produce a pattern of consistently positive student outcomes not found in any other type of American higher-education institution" (Astin 1999, 77; see also Pascarella and Terenzini 1991).

The Association of American Colleges and Universities' Greater Expectations report (2002) makes a persuasive argument that a liberal education may be more relevant today than at any previous time, given the social, cultural, and economic challenges facing college graduates. Yet, some of the educationally powerful features of liberal arts colleges could be constraints in a world that is becoming increasingly diverse in virtually every way. For example, because of their location or denominational affiliation, many liberal arts colleges are fairly homogeneous in terms of student and faculty racial and ethnic backgrounds. This relative lack of structural diversity reduces the probability a student will frequently interact with someone different from themselves in terms of race or ethnicity. Studies show that experiences with diversity are precursors to such desirable outcomes as improved intergroup relations, critical thinking, and satisfaction with the learning environment (Gurin 1999; Hurtado et al. 1999).

Thus, it would appear that in terms of having experiences with diversity, students at many liberal arts colleges may be disadvantaged compared with their counterparts at larger, more structurally diverse universities. At the same time, it is possible--as Mitchell Chang (2001) has demonstrated--that an institution can compensate for its relative lack of structural diversity by providing students with opportunities to experience and learn more about human diversity. Examples include required multicultural or diversity courses (often part of the general education component), elective ethnic studies courses, cultural awareness workshops, and cultural centers.

All this begs the question, how do students at liberal arts colleges fare in terms of experiencing diversity?

We provide a partial answer to this question by threading together key findings from two complementary projects. The first is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), an annual survey of tens of thousands of first-year and senior students (Kuh 2001, 2003). For this study we analyzed the responses of 98,744 undergraduates (49,706 first-year students and 49,038 seniors) from 349 four-year colleges and universities who participated in the NSSE survey in spring 2002. Of this group, 17,640 (9,598 first-year students and 8,042 seniors) were enrolled at sixty-eight baccalaureate liberal arts colleges, as defined by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (McCormick 2001). (1)

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The second project is a recently completed two-year study of twenty colleges and universities (Kuh et al. 2005). Known as Project DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practices), the schools selected for the study all had higher-than-predicted scores on NSSE and higher-than-predicted graduation rates. The purpose of DEEP was to discover and document the policies and practices at these schools that contributed to the better than expected performance by their students. (2)

Experiences with diversity: How do liberal arts colleges stack up?

The NSSE data point to two general conclusions. The first is about diversity experiences at liberal arts colleges compared with other types of colleges and universities. The second is related to students' experiences with diversity at liberal arts colleges.

First, students at liberal arts colleges report more frequent experiences with diversity on average than do their counterparts at other types of institutions. Table 1 illustrates this where the overall diversity experiences score for liberal arts colleges is set at zero. The pattern of negative effect sizes for all the other types of institutions indicates that students at liberal arts colleges, on average, report more experiences with diversity compared with other schools. The effect size is the proportion of a standard deviation change in the dependent variable (in this instance, diversity experiences) associated with the independent variable (institutional type). The larger the effect size, the more likely the differences are "real." For our purposes, an effect size of 0.20 is worthy of note.