Influences on students' openness to diversity and challenge in the first year of college

It appears clear that diversity comprises a central aspect of America's future. According to a 1989 Census Bureau projection, during the next four decades (1990-2030), the white population of the United States will grow by about 25 percent. During that same 40-year period, the African-American population will increase by 68 percent, the Asian-American, Pacific Island-American, and American Indian populations will grow by 79 percent, and the Latino or Hispanic population of the United States will leap by 187 percent. The Population Reference Bureau has projected that, by the year 2080, the United States of America may well be 24 percent Latino, 15 percent African-American, and 12 percent Asian American--more than half of the nation's population [15]. If the trends projected above represent the country's future demographic reality, then it is likely that future college graduates will be challenged by a society that is increasingly diverse in terms of race, culture, and values. It seems reasonable, therefore, to be concerned with identifying the ways in which American postsecondary institutions engender in students a greater openness to racial, cultural, and value diversity. A substantial amount of inquiry has addressed the issue of the impact of college on attitudes, values, and the ways in which individuals relate to their external world. While only indirectly related to openness to racial, cultural, and value diversity, the weight of evidence from this research suggests that during college, students tend to change in the direction of greater openness and tolerance. From freshman to senior year, students become less authoritarian, dogmatic, and ethnocentric [7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 40]. They also demonstrate statistically significant shifts in the direction of greater social, racial, ethnic, and political tolerance and greater support for individual rights [5, 6, 9, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 38, 39, 41, 43]. Moreover, as Pascarella and Terenzini [35] point out in their synthesis of the literature on college impact, the evidence is reasonably clear that on most of the above dimensions a statistically significant part of the change observed can be attributed to college attendance itself, above and beyond that attributable to normal maturation or to societal changes. Another line of inquiry has attempted to identify the specific college experiences that influence changes in values, attitudes, and the ways in which individuals relate to their external world. Perhaps the clearest generalization that can be made from this evidence is that it is the student's interpersonal environment (for example, the frequency and nature of his or her interactions with peers and faculty) that has the greatest impact on value, attitudinal and psychosocial change during college [for example, 4, 12, 19, 35]. Of course, a major shortcoming of the existing body of evidence is that it fails to address directly the impact of specific dimensions of the college experience on students' appreciation and acceptance of cultural, racial, and value diversity. What research does exist has investigated the extent to which diversity and multiculturalism on campus influence other outcomes of college. This work was conducted by Astin [3, 4] in his analysis of 25,000 students attending 217 four-year colleges and universities between 1985 and 1989. Controlling for important precollege characteristics and other potential confounding influences, he found that three different measures of diversity (institutional diversity emphasis, faculty diversity emphasis, and direct student experience with diversity) had significant positive impacts on a number of salient college outcomes. For example, the extent to which an institution emphasized and supported racial and multicultural diversity among faculty and students had a positive impact on an individual student's commitment to promoting racial understanding. …