Research goals
Through my research I was hoping to learn more about how college students value racial diversity in an education setting. I want to see the trends in the data that will argue which groups of students value diversity more than other students. It will be interesting to see if those who value racial diversity go to diverse colleges or if they just wish they did. Also, I want to see if the students who went to diverse high schools and lived in diverse cities tended to value diversity more, less or basically the same as other students.
Research methodology
Since I was looking to learn about the value of racial diversity at college, I decided to survey young adults who were either: about to go to college, in college or just out of college. It was also important for me to survey a diverse group of students in order to have a good way to compare how the value of diversity changes as the group of students changes.
I was able to post my survey on my own Facebook page, and text some of my friends at colleges across the country. By doing this, I got responses from many different colleges. I also used the Santa Clara frisbee team’s “google group” in order to get responses from alumni who went to Santa Clara previously. By asking many different groups of people, I was able to get 74 responses to my survey, which provided a big enough sample size to see trends in the data.
Survey Analysis
The following table shows how people respond to the statement, “I wish my college was more racially diverse.” The data suggests that for many students, racial diversity is an important part of what they value in college. This is seen because 64% of students either “agreed” or “completely agreed” with the statement. Only a total of 7.4% of respondents either “disagreed” or completely disagreed,” which suggests that students tend to wish their colleges were more diverse.
When I started the survey process, I thought that people who went to a diverse high school would value diversity higher than students who went to less diverse high schools. The following table corroborates my belief but to less of an extent than I thought. While only 4 respondents went to extremely diverse high schools, which is a very small sample size, they valued diversity much more than other students did. They valued diversity at a 4 on a scale from 1-5. No other group of respondents valued diversity higher than 3.4 out of 5. The other groups of respondents seemed to value diversity about the same, regardless of what type of high school they went to. This seems to suggest that unless students went to extremely diverse high schools, the level of diversity at the schools did not affect how much diversity was valued.
