In the education system, diversity can often be viewed through the lens of enrollment of students from different backgrounds. Research from Kellogg highlights that true diversity goes beyond enrollment and also includes what happens to people after they get through the door.

The researchers wanted to explore whether having a diverse student body means that students have interactions with a diverse group of people. They asked students to record the social interactions they have each day. The results suggest that simply having a diverse campus is not enough in and of itself to support interaction across groups.

Resisting homophily

The power of homophily can be extremely strong, and society at large can often be highly segregated as a result. Universities tend to buck that trend and provide a melting pot of diversity. As such, they provide a natural Petri dish for such an experiment.

As well as measuring the nature of the interactions students were having, the researchers also gauged how those interactions made people feel. Were they stressed or threatened, for instance? Did they affect how much they felt they belonged?

The results show that there were sadly 15% fewer interactions across groups than one would expect by chance alone. Indeed, there were 27% fewer interactions across different races than chance should suggest. Those that did engage in more inter-group interactions tended to be from lower- and working-class backgrounds.

It appears that even when presented with the opportunity for diverse interactions, we don’t always take those opportunities. What’s more, students who did engage in cross-class and cross-race interactions ended up feeling less empathy for their partner, while also viewing those interactions as less successful than those with peers from the same class and/or race.

This is bad news as the study found that such interactions were beneficial, especially to students from underrepresented backgrounds. For instance, students from Latinx and Black backgrounds achieved higher GPAs after cross-group interactions, while also reporting feeling a greater sense of belonging.

Despite this, it seems that students don’t tend to seek out diverse interactions without a degree of encouragement. As such, the researchers believe that universities could do more to encourage cross-group interactions.

“We need to think about how to intentionally create systems to ensure that people are actually interacting across differences and have the potential to benefit from those differences,” they conclude.