Assignments, The Game-Changer
That sounds pretty snazzy, doesn’t it? Well it seems to be true, at least in terms of the racial diversity of students’ friends during college. Most students make friends within their own ethnic and racial groups, rarely venturing outside of that. However, residence halls, and assignments can be a fertile place for these preferences to be tweaked, according to “Interracial Friendships in the Transition to College: Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together Once They Leave The Nest,” an article in the current issue of Sociology of Education.
According to authors Elizabeth Stearns (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Claudia Buchmann (Ohio State University) and Kara Bonneau (Duke University):
“Residential college campuses offer multiple settings for contact… First, college students tend to reside together on campus. Residence halls may be particularly conducive environments for fostering interracial friendships, given the close and sustained nature of the contact that is found in them. The more intimate and informal nature of residence hall life may serve to put roommates and hallmates on an equal footing in terms of status and provide a richer seedbed for forming friendships relative to the structured, formal settings of college classrooms.”
Moreover, the authors note, administrators can further encourage such contact through assignments and other residential programs.
Tags: Multiculturalism, Students
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