ETS, Harvard to Study Progress of Diversity at Predominantly White Colleges

Educational Testing Service (ETS) is collaborating with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University to study what it is like to be an undergraduate member of a racial or ethnic minority on a predominantly white college campus. Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the study, "The Voices of Diversity," will explore the views of minority students, including their accounts of their curricular, co-curricular and social experiences. Students will be asked to describe what, on their campus, has made them feel welcomed, respected, supported and encouraged, and what has made them feel unwelcome, disrespected, unsupported and discouraged.

Nettles and his staff will conduct the research with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and Dr. Paula J. Caplan, a Research Associate at the Du Bois Institute and former Professor of Applied Psychology, University of Toronto. The project is funded by a $400,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Michigan for the first year and focuses on undergraduate students from four universities. Researchers will interview female and male African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic and American Indian students as well as a limited number of white students as a control group.