Diversity Presents Opportunity for Higher Ed

Another topic that follows the future of education theme and that college and university educators must grapple with is diversity.

The Ontario government suggests that 70% of jobs will require post-secondary education by 2013. This upward trend is likely not shocking to very many people, but if you think about it colleges and universities have gone through quite a dramatic evolution over the past 50 years.

Up to the middle of the 20th century university enrollment was much lower and colleges did not exist in Ontario. Centennial College was Ontario's first college and it opened in 1966. In the type of environment that existed 50 years ago it would have been very difficult for most students to go to university. Students that grew up in a background with some advantages, such as parents that attended university or a family with a higher income, stood a much greater chance of being able to continue their education beyond high school.

Today, in our knowledge based economy it is now generally accepted that a person's chances of being successful increase if they attend college or university. The expansion of higher education has meant students from very different backgrounds are participating in college and university. As a result our campuses are much more diverse today then 50 years ago on many measures. This leads me to wonder if we are taking full advantage of this opportunity to educate our students about diversity in its many forms.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and one part has troubled me. Gladwell acknowledged that he struggled as well. In chapter three Gladwell describes his experience with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In this test participants are given a list of words and asked to place each word in one of two catagories. The catagories are labelled with a pair of words. In Blink one of the examples had Male or Career as one category and Female or Family as the other category. In the real test, participants are timed on how long it takes them to place each word in the list in one of the two catagories. Changing the word pairings leads to different results which brings me to the part that has troubled me.

A second example in Blink used the following two catagories: European American or Bad and African American or Good. The reader was then asked to place the following words in one of these two categories: hurt, evil, glorious, wonderful and so on. Pictures were also used. The word pairings were then changed to European American or Good and African American or Bad and the reader was asked to catagorize the same list of words and pictures again. My experience matched Gladwell's in that I was able to catagorize the words faster when the European American/Good and African American/Bad were paired.

Part of Gladwell's explanation for this outcome is that "we live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good." He also quotes Mahzarin Banaji, one of the IAT researchers at Harvard University, "You don't choose the make positive associations with the dominant group. But you are required to. All around you, that group is being paired with good things. You open the newspaper and you turn on the television, and you can't escape it."

In trying to understand this phenomenon I have had many thoughts, such as:

• How can this information be used to help train our student leaders?
• What systems or processes can we alter to benefit a greater number of our students?
• What can be done so all students feel that they belong to their college or university community?

Answers to these questions are certainly not easily found, but post-secondary education has evolved to include much diversity and the IAT points out that our past decisions may have been biased.