What 30 Years of Campus Racial Climate Research Can Teach Higher Ed

Across three decades of research on campus racial climate, many negative experiences that students of color face remain stubbornly consistent, according to a new study published in the Community College Journal of Research and Practice.

The overview of more than 100 campus climate studies shows that students of color continue to feel less at home on campuses than their white classmates and often encounter racism in their day-to-day lives as students.

The study also highlights underexplored areas for further research, including a need for more data on racial climate at community colleges and students’ racial experiences in activities such as internships and study abroad programs.

The authors, higher ed scholars Shaun Harper and Oscar Patrón, drew on 140 qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies conducted since the 1990s, spanning hundreds of higher ed institutions, a dozen peer-reviewed journals and several search engines like Google Scholar. Then, to tease out key themes, they grouped the body of research into three categories: studies on how different racial groups perceive campus climate, minority students’ experiences of prejudicial or racist campus environments, and the benefits associated with campuses that foster cross-racial engagement. The study builds on an earlier paper that Harper co-authored in 2007, which was a 15-year overview of campus racial climate research.

Patrón, an assistant professor of higher education at Indiana University, said little has shifted for students of color since that first paper, which should be a wake-up call for higher ed leaders.

“That in and of itself is a very important finding,” he said. “What does that tell us about higher education? Why haven’t things changed that much? Being reflective on that question can help us and guide us in designing practices that will hopefully mitigate some of the issues that students are experiencing.”

The article found that across the decades of research—40 studies representing views from 162,579 students—students of color consistently hold less rosy perceptions of campus racial climates and felt less of a sense of belonging than their white peers. Those students also regularly report feeling that college leaders fell short in their responses to hate crimes and racial incidents on campuses. Most of these studies, about 70 percent, were fielded at individual institutions.

Another set of studies, focused on underrepresented students’ brushes with racism and race-related stress on campuses, found that such experiences remain common. Across four mixed-methods, 47 qualitative and nine quantitative studies, students reported a range of negative experiences, including being called racial slurs, attending classes as the lone member of a particular racial group, encountering blackface and being excluded from predominantly white Greek-life organizations. The article noted that, since 2017, there have been a surge of studies on microaggressions, which add “more nuance and dimensionality to the study of students’ racialized experiences.”

Harper, a professor of education, public policy and business at the University of Southern California and columnist for Inside Higher Ed, believes research on campus racial climate has become more “multidimensional” in recent years because more scholars are researching the topic now, bringing new perspectives and approaches. For example, he said, more researchers are taking an intersectional approach to the study of campus racial climate, examining how students’ various identities—including gender, religion and sexual orientation—affect their experiences related to race and ethnicity on campuses.

“The literature has become much more complex in a way that I think is really good,” Harper said.

The study offered another positive finding—the consistent educational benefits of students engaging across racial groups. Forty peer-reviewed papers, representing a total of 209,886 respondents, focused on what students gained from regularly and meaningfully interacting with a diverse group of peers. Two-thirds of those papers were multicampus studies, and 77.5 percent focused on two or more racial groups. About 17.5 percent of the studies only included white students and emphasized the benefits of interracial engagement for them.

But the authors also emphasized that three decades of research on campus racial climate only covers a fraction of what they believe needs to be studied. They listed 25 possible directions for future research, including campus climate in online learning environments and on social media, as well as the campus experiences of less studied populations such as Indigenous and multiracial students.

They also encouraged more studies focused on campus climate at community colleges and minority-serving institutions, given how few have taken place at those types of institutions.

“It is overwhelmingly four-year [predominantly white institutions] that are centered in such research,” Patrón said, even though community colleges disproportionately serve students of color, including more than half of Latino and Native American students who are enrolled in higher education nationally. “We need to be better as a researcher- and practitioner-based community to ensure that we are serving all of our students, especially the most vulnerable students and diverse institutional types.”

Harper said some of the future research ideas put forward in the article feel especially urgent at a time when state legislatures and the federal government have cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion work on campuses. For example, it recommends future studies on how students’ racial and political identities interact, how they’re explicitly affected by racism, and the effects of state-level DEI bans and other off-campus politics on students’ experiences.

“Just because DEI offices, programs and positions have gone away, that doesn’t mean that racism has gone away,” Harper said. “Even in the absence of formal DEI infrastructures, we have to continue to study how students of color are experiencing the climate and where racism shows up in their experiences … because those understandings could help ultimately justify the resurrection of offices, programs and positions to deal with those challenges—but we can’t deal with them if we don’t know what they are.”