Appraised, signaled, and compromised : how universities construct and students negotiate gender and racial identities in U.S. higher education

U.S. colleges and universities are producers. They produce knowledge, social inequality, social mobility, and cultural values and ideas like meritocracy, opportunity, and diversity. Individuals -- students, families, faculty, employees, and other members of society who otherwise engage with universities -- are their partners in production. This dissertation explores how individuals respond to variable organizational constructions of identities and cultural ideas across the higher education lifecourse: during the undergraduate admissions process, on their college application, and once on-campus. I focus on the production of identities which disrupt or complicate commonly accepted categories or cultural mores: mixed-race students whose identities blur mutually exclusive representations and understandings of diversity, and women who cross gendered disciplinary boundaries by intending to study Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) in college. In "Identity Appraisals and Diversity in U.S. Selective Admissions, " I explore how applicants, families, and college together negotiate the boundaries of diversity in U.S. higher education. Drawing on 41 interviews with mixed-race applicants and their families, I advance the term identity appraisals, or the discernment of the meanings and values assigned to identities by colleges. Identity appraisals help explain the decision-making of my study participants, whose multiracial identities are variably interpretable and classified. In doing so, I offer an initial sketch of the evolving boundaries of diversity in higher education, and how the multiracial category can be differentially interpreted as inconsequential, a potential liability, or an asset. In "Signaled or Suppressed? How Gender Informs Women's Undergraduate Applications in Biology and Engineering, " I descriptively and computationally analyze 60,000 applications to the University of California to understand how gender informs major intention and narrative self-presentation for women intending to pursue STEM study in college. I find that women making gender-transgressive major choices write in ways that signal their gender identity to a greater extent than women who remain within gendered disciplinary boundaries. I take this as evidence that prescriptive and proscriptive ideas about men and women's academic choices remain highly salient in a moment of imagining future academic and professional selves. In "'As Diverse as Possible:' How Universities Compromise Multiracial Identities, " I draw on 38 interviews with self-identifying multiracial undergraduates at Western University to demonstrate how everyday university practices compromise multiracial identities in the pursuit of diversity, and thereby communicate to students that multiracial identities are both a challenge to accommodate and of potential utility to institutions seeking to appear as diverse as possible. Together, my dissertation uncovers the often unspoken and implicit processes by which organizations construct identities, individuals perform them in response, and together, how cultural ideas, beliefs, and values become real and tangible

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Antonio Anthony Lising
Correll Shelley Joyce
Saperstein Aliya
Stevens Mitchell L.