The Educational Benefits of Sustaining Cross-racial Interaction among Undergraduates *

This study examined whether or not students who either had higher levels of cross-racial interaction during college or had same-institution peers with higher average levels of this type of interaction tend to report significantly larger developmental gains than their counterparts. Unlike previous quantitative studies that tested cross-racial interaction using single-level linear models, this study more accurately models the structure of multilevel data by applying Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). The general pattern of findings suggests that higher individual levels of cross-racial interaction have positive effects on students' openness to diversity, cognitive development, and self-confidence. The results also show that even though a student’s own level of cross-racial interaction is a more direct and powerful way to realize developmental gains, simply being in an environment where other students are interacting frequently also contributes to students’ self-reported development. * Forthcoming in The Journal of Higher Education. Chang et al., EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS OF CROSS-RACIAL INTERACTION 2 In June of 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School's practice of considering race in admissions by a margin of 5-4 (Grutter v. Bollinger), but struck down the formulaic approach for admitting freshmen by a margin of 6-3 (Gratz v. Bollinger). Even though the Court limited the use of race by rejecting mechanical scoring systems that assign bonus points to underrepresented students, they left the door open for colleges and universities to continue to consider race in admissions in order to enroll a “critical mass” of racially/ethnically diverse students. Among the Court itself, there was major disagreement over the value and effects of diversity in an educational setting. For example, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who authored the majority opinion in the Grutter, wrote that “student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify using race in university admissions,” whereas her counterpart Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the dissenting opinion that he was not convinced that educational benefits flowed from diversity and listed this shortcoming as one of a long list of issues that could potentially bring about future lawsuits. Given the conflicting opinions, it is clear that the controversy regarding claims about the educational benefits of diversity is far from settled, and that there continues to be a pressing need to understand empirically how students actually benefit, if at all, from being in more racially/ethnically diverse environments. This study applies a multilevel approach to the examination of the student and institution-level effects of one key form of diversity, namely, frequency of cross-racial interaction. This study is guided by two key research questions: 1) How do college students who report high levels versus low levels of cross-racial interaction compare with regards to the educational outcomes of openness to diversity, cognitive development, and self-confidence? 2) How do students who attend institutions with high peer versus low peer average levels of cross-racial interaction compare on measures of openness to diversity, cognitive development, and self-confidence?