Most of the time, I try to write a post that includes both a deep dive into some morsel of data and a few implications that I think might be embedded in that data. But this week, I think I’m going to try to dispense with a longer examination of implications and just lay out a set of responses to a single question from our recent survey of prospective students that we conducted in collaboration with the Hanover Research Group.
An early question in the survey asked the respondents to select the top five words that best described the college they would most like to attend. You might recall that last week I pointed out that “affordable” was the most frequently selected word (not a big surprise, right?) and that “liberal arts” was pretty far down the list.
Although it’s certainly interesting to see the ordering of selected words from highest to lowest, it’s also potentially enlightening to look at how different subgroups of respondents respond to similar words. Parsing the responses of white and non-white respondents exposes a stark difference worth noting.
In digging deeper in the responses to this same question, the disparity between white and non-white respondents in selecting the word “diverse” really jumped out at me. White respondents selected this word 15% of the time. Non-white respondents selected this word 46% of the time. Given the substantial demographic shifts that are already underway across our primary recruiting region, this difference seems particularly important. In addition to the moral imperative for us to continue to diversify our student body, it appears that ignoring such an imperative could increase our future economic risk as well.
While this finding is interesting, asking respondents to choose their top five words from a long list of possible options can complicate the interpretation of the results. So I want to show you another set of responses, parsed by white and non-white respondents, to a very specific question that asks respondents to indicate how important a diverse student body is to them when selecting a college.
Response Option White Non-White
| Not at all important | 11% | 2% | ||
| Slightly important | 19% | 3% | ||
| Moderately important | 40% | 27% | ||
| Very important | 25% | 38% | ||
| Essential | 5% | 31% | ||
| Very important + Essential | 30% | 69% |
As you can probably tell, non-white respondents trend toward thinking that a diverse student body matters a lot. By contrast, it appears that white respondents trend toward thinking that a diverse student body matters some, but not nearly as much.
Yes; there is probably more than one reason for this difference in responses. And it’s not as if the difference between the two sets of responses are in complete opposition to each other. But, I hope this data will further underscore the reasons why we need to be active champions for equality. We’ve still got a long way to go.
Make it a good day,
Mark