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Students, faculty, and administrators across American higher education generally acknowledge the benefits of a diverse campus community. AAC&U's Engaging Diverse Viewpoints: What Is the Campus Climate for Perspective-Taking? identified students' ability to engage and learn from difference as “a crucial catalyst for intellectual and moral growth” (Dey & Associates, 2010, p. ix).
We know too little about the success of our efforts to stimulate such growth, but we now know something about students' perceptions of their college's efforts to promote diversity. Six years ago, a small group of liberal arts colleges in New England (Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury, Smith, Trinity and Wellesley) and their regional accreditor (the New England Association of Schools and Colleges) formed the New England Consortium on Assessment and Student Learning (NECASL). The general goals of this collaboration were to understand how students make important decisions during college, to assess the extent to which institutional policies and practices foster student learning, and to modify those policies and practices accordingly.
In this article we focus on interview data from a subset of students from the class of 2010 that address these students' perspectives on their college's commitment to diversity and success in achieving it, as well as how those perspectives changed over time.
LLee Cuba (lcuba@wellesley.edu) of Wellesley College, Nancy Jennings (njenning@bowdoin.edu) and Suzanne Lovett (slovett@bowdoin.edu) of Bowdoin College, Joseph Swingle (jswingle@wellesley.edu) from Wellesley College, Heather Lindkvist (hlindkvi@bates.edu) at Bates College, and Adam Howard (mahoward@colby.edu) of Colby College are all faculty members who participated in the New England Consortium on Assessment and Student Learning (NECASL)’s study of students’ perceptions of diversity on their campuses. For a more complete description of the project, visit http://www/wellesley.edu/NECASL/.
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