Undergraduate Students' Perceptions of Diversity Over Time

• Published in: Journal of diversity in higher education 2020-06, Vol.13 (2), p.120-132
• Main Authors: Dingel, Molly J., Sage, Starr K.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attitude Change; College Students; Color Vision Deficiency; Consciousness Raising; Diversity; Ethnicity; Female; Gender Issues; Human; Male; Program Effectiveness; Race; Racial and Ethnic Differences; Racial Bias; Racial Differences; Racism; Religion; School Learning; Sexual Orientation; Socioeconomic Status; Student Attitudes; Students; Time Perception; Undergraduate Students
• ISSN: 1938-8926; 1938-8934
• DOI: 10.1037/dhe0000119

The United States is an increasingly diverse nation. It is therefore critical to cultivate an appreciation of racial difference. To bridge lay understandings with the reality of racial inequality, we must understand the ways citizens think about diversity and contextualize these within our current racial structure. In this paper, we interviewed 32 first- and second-year college students about their perceptions of diversity and, in the context of diversity, how well they fit in at their university. We reinterviewed 18 of these students 2 years later, when they were in their third or fourth year in college. We found that these students classified a wide range of traits under the concept of diversity. With respect to race, students exhibited a high degree of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes as color-blind racism. Beyond that, we found that although students' attitudes about diversity were quite stable over these 2 years, there were interesting changes. Namely, students' introduction of learning styles and career goals in the second interviews reflects both the depth with which individuals' concepts of difference and diversity are deeply embedded in their social context, and that color-blind ideology is flexible enough to incorporate these context-specific frameworks.