Legitimating Prestige through Diversity: How Higher Education Institutions Represent Ethno-Racial Diversity across Levels of Selectivity

ABSTRACT

Elite higher education institutions work hard to secure diverse classes, and students seek out these institutions in part because they believe that diversity will enhance their own educational experiences. Institutional theories would predict that practices set by the elite institutions in the field would isomorphically trickle down, however, case studies of individual institutions indicate that higher education structures and cultures vary significantly across the spectrum of selectivity. Do all higher education institutions market their ethno-racial diversity to prospective students in the same ways as elite institutions? Are higher education institutions trying to send similar messages about their ethno-racial diversity or does this vary by selectivity level? This paper provides an examination of higher education at the organizational field level in order to answer questions that have previously been at the institutional level. Through analyzing the admissions webpages at 278 universities across the United States, we find that more selective institutions are more likely to represent their diversity, and more likely to engage in practices that emphasize their traditionally under-represented minority student populations than less selective institutions, though it is the less selective institutions that have higher populations of these students. We argue that variations in institutional habitus across selectivity help to explain these differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• diversity
• marketing

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank S. Michael Gaddis, Laura Hamilton, Kelly Nielson and Josipa Roksa for their comments on early drafts. The would also like to thank the participants in the Center for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) for their comments, questions and suggestions. Leandra Cate and Fanya Wu provided excellent research assistance. This research was presented at the Sociology of Education Association Conference in February 2019.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The completion of all IPEDS surveys is mandatory for institutions that participate in or are applicants for any federal student financial aid program authorized by Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended (20 USC 1094, Section 487(a)(17) and 34 CFR 668.14(b)(19)).

2. DiMaggio (1982, as cited in DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) defines fields as organizations that interact with each other and have an awareness of their common institutional goals, among other factors.

3. Our sample, Carnegie Classified Doctoral Granting Institutions, contains only historically White institutions. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are in the Special Focus Carnegie Classification.

4. Structural diversity is often contrasted with “interactional diversity” which is concerned with the relationships and interactions that happen cross-racially as a result of a diverse setting.

5. There are 321 Carnegie Classification Doctoral Granting Institutions (R1, R2 and R3) that are in the fifty US States, plus DC, Title IV participating, and not offering their doctoral programs entirely online. Of this group, 278 of them have Barron’s prestige rankings. Because our research question is about how representation varies by prestige, we limited our sample to Carnegie Classification Doctoral Granting Institutions (R1, R2 and R3) that had been classified by Barron’s in 2017.

6. Saichaie (2011) proposes that higher education website text can be analyzed using critical discourse analysis to assess how institutions work to establish legitimacy through their online representation. We extend that beyond text here to include graphic representations and tables.

7. Ford and Patterson (2019) investigated a similar set of websites looking for whether less diverse higher education institutions are more likely to broadcast diversity.

8. We also identified one additional category of representation that we term Disaggregation. This occurred when universities broke down their Asian and/or Latinx populations into specific nationalities. We found this pattern occurred regionally (typically among universities on the West Coast). Since this pattern was not directly related to our research question (it did not vary by selectivity level) we did not include it. Interested readers should contact the authors for additional data.

9. Ford and Patterson (2019) use similar categories to examine diversity representations by how diverse the university actually was. They used a similar sampling frame and methods and compared representations against IPEDS categories. Our salient categories mirror theirs.