In the current context of legal challenges to affirmative action and race-based considerations in college admissions, educators have been challenged to articulate clearly the educational purposes and benefits of diversity. In this article, Patricia Gurin, Eric Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin explore the relationship between students' experiences with diverse peers in the college or university setting and their educational outcomes. Rooted in theories of cognitive development and social psychology, the authors present a framework for understanding how diversity introduces the relational discontinuities critical to identity construction and its subsequent role in fostering cognitive growth. Using both single-and multi-institutional data from the University of Michigan and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program. the authors go on to examine the effects of classroom diversity and informal interaction among African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and White students on learning and democrat} outcomes. The results of their analyses underscore the educational and civic importance of informal interaction among different racial and ethnic groups during the college years. The authors offer their findings as e-•idence of the continuing importance of affirmative action and diversity efforts by colleges and universities, not only as a means of increasing access to higher education for greater numbers of students, but also as a means offostering students' academic and social growth. Educators in L .S. higher education have long argued that affirmative action policies are justified because they ensure the creation of the racially and eth

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This paper summarizes findings from classic and contemporary research on campus racial climate according to a four-dimensional model: (a) an institution’s historical legacy of inclusion or exclusion of various racial/ethnic groups, (b) its structural diversity, or the numerical representation of various racial/ethnic groups, (c) the psychological climate of perceptions and attitudes between and among groups, and (d) the behavioral climate, of campus intergroup relations. For each dimension, the paper recommends ways to enhance educational policy.

This chapter synthesizes fifteen years of published research on campus racial climates. It also presents nine themes that emerged from a qualitative study of campus racial climates at five predominantly White universities.

This longitudinal study examined factors that contribute to the persistence of underrepresented racial minority (URM) undergraduates in STEM fields. The primary source of data came from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's 2004 The Freshman Survey (TFS) and 2008 College Senior Survey (CSS). The sample included 3,670 students at 217 institutions who indicated on the TFS that they intended to major in a STEM field, 1,634 of whom were underrepresented minority (URM) students. Findings indicate that Black and Latino undergraduates were significantly less likely to persist in STEM majors than were their White and Asian American counterparts. Background characteristics and college experiences moderated this race effect, suggesting both that pre‐college factors may explain some of the observed racial disparities and that individual institutions can take more concrete actions to improve science achievement. Findings from the follow‐up analysis of the sample of URMs suggest that institutions can improve URM STEM persistence by increasing the likelihood that those students will engage in key academic experiences: studying frequently with others, participating in undergraduate research, and involvement in academic clubs or organizations. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 51: 555–580, 2014