Three papers on Black student well-being in HWCUs: Social capital, belonging and identity

Abstract

In the tradition of studies that focus on Black students’ experiences in HWCUs, the three papers in this dissertation broadly address how organizational structures and campus environments at HWCUs influence the experiences of Black students. I examine this topic at a single site, Millington College (pseudonym), a college of performing arts in the United States. Millington is a particularly relevant site to examine my research question as the beginning of my research coincided with the creation and implementation of LEAD (pseudonym), a pre-enrollment and academic year support program for Black students. Programs like LEAD, which I broadly refer to as race-specific enrichment programs (RSEPs), are one of several tools that higher education administrators use to support Black and other minoritized students. As I discuss in this dissertation, HWCUs’ attempts to create structures to support Black students can have unintended consequences for the students who attend these programs, despite administrators’ best intentions. The three papers included in this dissertation draw on 50 interviews with 37 informants, as well as a survey of 32 students. The totality of my data collection at Millington, however, was more expansive and included roughly 20 hours of participant and non-participant observation, two interviews with students who identify as Black but are not a US citizens or permanent residents, and in turn, were outside of the scope of my research, and interviews with 10 Millington faculty and administrators. Though these data do not appear explicitly in the chapters that follow, the insights and perspectives I gained in collecting and analyzing these data helped shape my thinking and the according conclusions that I present. The first paper, presented in chapter 2, examines Black students’ experiences with different-race interactions on campus, and how these interactions are associated with their willingness to engage in different-race interactions. Drawing on interviews with 37 students, I induced three core findings. First, several informants who were socialized in predominantly-Black high school and neighborhood contexts chose to attend Millington, in part, to have relationships with non-Black peers. Second, perceptions of racial homogeneity among social groups at Millington preceded many informants’ reticence to have interactions with different-race peers. Last, several informants were subject to experiences of microaggressions and racism, which alongside their perceptions of racial homogeneity in social life at Millington, reinforced their reticence to have interactions with different-race peers. I discuss these findings in the context of recent contributions to the homophily literature. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on participants in the LEAD program and addresses two questions. First, what is the relationship between Black students’ identities and the experiences of their relationships with same-race peers in an RSEP? Second, how do Black students’ experiences of these relationships influence their perceptions of the costs to access the benefits of the social capital the RSEP is designed to generate? Drawing on 27 interviews with 18 participants in LEAD, I find that students’ experiences with their same-race peers varied based on the extent to which they had prior exposure to predominantly-Black institutions and communities, and whether they held salient and marginalized non-racial social identities. Based on these findings, I identify three ways that the informants experienced relationships with same-race peers in the LEAD program: affirmed, rationalized, and alienated. While nearly all informants identified benefits of the social capital that LEAD generated, informants who experienced rationalized and alienated relationships perceived costs to access the social capital that LEAD generated, and in turn, to remain connected to the LEAD community. I discuss these findings in the context of theory on social capital and the intersectionality literature. Chapter 4 further focuses on participants in the LEAD program, and places findings from interviews with 28 students and 32 survey respondents in the context of the literatures on belonging and identity. Despite the prevalence of RSEPs, there are two related gaps in our understanding of RSEPs and how they influence their participants’ experiences of social life in HWCUs. First, scholarly investigations of minoritized students’ experiences in HWCUs often take for granted that they generally experience belongingness in their campus’ co-ethnoracial groups and communities. Second, we know little about how minoritized students’ perceptions of their ethnoracial identities change once arriving on campus and participating in RSEPs, and how these perceptions are associated with their feelings of belonging to the RSEP. In two phases of research, I find that without explicit programmatic supports that emphasize the importance of inclusion within the RSEP, students with limited prior exposure to same-race peers may experience RSEPs negatively. I close by discussing the practical implications of this research for college administrators and student affairs professionals whose campuses support minoritized students through RSEPs.