This month’s publication review was contributed by Cherry Danielson, Associate Director of Institutional Research and Assessment at Carleton College (cdaniels@carleton.edu). Cherry reviews Ethnicity in College: Advancing Theory and Improving Diversity Practices on Campus, written by Anna Ortiz and Silvia Santos; published by Stylus Publishing in 2009 (ISBN: 978 1 57922 332 8).

Ethnicity in College isn’t just another book on diversity. Granted, our bookshelves reflect the fact that the literature on diversity and related issues in higher education has flourished in the past two decades; however, don’t let that dissuade you from picking up this new book by Ortiz and Santos. These authors make a case for a more sophisticated model of student development based on their research and challenge us to ask anew, “How does the college experience affect the development of identity in students?” Their research expands our understanding of the complex nature of identity development and the multiple and sometimes surprising roles that students’ ethnicity and race play as ethnic identity emerges during the college years.

Ortiz and Santos situate their work amid familiar student development theorists— Erickson, Chickering, Reisser, and Marcia. These theories point to critical events in the lives of students that help to crystallize their identity; the changing roles of family and friends; the acceptance or rejection of a personal history; and the factors that lead to either shaping or diffusing identity, among others. From these foundations, this study explores a holistic look at the students that attend college, the culture within which the students live, and the response of students to these surroundings.

This study employed a combination of methods to elicit multiple dimensions of each student’s development and their campus experiences. The student sample (120), which was almost equally divided among White, Asian, Latinos/as, and African American participants, responded to questionnaires and most also participated in interviews. The researchers garnered rich descriptions from students portraying what it was like growing up in particular ethnic skins and family culture. What makes this study different is that participants were asked explicitly to make meaning of their own upbringing and reflect on connections among the various parts of their lives. In this process, they verbalized how their own values and beliefs about self and others developed over time. Students also recounted their experiences on campus with regard to the connections to other ethnic groups as well as their own. In these ways, students engaged in meta-cognition regarding their own ethnic development. One striking result of the study demonstrated that White students were less aware of their own ethnicity or correlated factors of development than other students.

At the institution level, this study asks us to consider how the campus environment affects student development. Altogether, this study describes an overarching picture of how students negotiate campus cultures that vary in terms of how well colleges “work” at being the incubators for ethnicity development. The findings challenge us to look at our college cultures and ask ourselves how the policies, systems, values, and traditions either facilitate or attenuate positive ethnicity development. In the end, the lingering question that emerges from this study is whether our institutions are actually aware of their own ethnicity and the ways that this embedded ethnicity correlates with students’ development.

The authors refer to foundational research in the past 20 years that has unearthed some key personal and academic outcomes of positive and negative ethnic identity. Ortiz and Santos move this work forward by illuminating these seemingly straightforward relationships to show the other factors that are at play within these very complicated relationships. Their results open our thinking about the combinations of variables that affect ethnic identity, self-acceptance, and self-esteem. Specifically, Ortiz and Santos introduce the importance of four relationships an individual has with their ethnicity: private acceptance, public acceptance, personal identity, and membership identity. Their data demonstrate how each of these can affect college efficacy, social efficacy, academic efficacy and self-esteem differently.

This well-framed study raises the reader’s consciousness of the interactions among multiple elements of student background and college environment in the development of ethnic identity. The research unfolds in the words of students and the analyses are thoughtful and enlightening. For institutional researchers, this book provides some expanded language and conceptual models about how ethnic identity development affects outcomes in higher education. As institutions examine their influence on students, this book is an important read. The results of this study can benefit our students.

Many thanks to Cherry for writing this book review. Have you discovered a new publication you think would be of great interest to your IR colleagues? Send your suggestions to Gayle Fink (gfink@bowiestate.edu).