Examining Program and Service Engagement by Student Race/Ethnicity

The end of the year offers opportunity for reflection, including celebrating successes and identifying opportunities for improvement. One step in this process can involve documenting program and service engagement, both overall and for particular subgroups of students. This documentation allows us to examine how well our programs and services are reaching the broader Duke undergraduate community and the specific populations we aim to serve.

One dimension that is important to examine is engagement by race/ethnicity. National and local data indicate that students of color are often underrepresented in service utilization (e.g., Lipson et al., 2022). Moreover, inequities in the US education system more broadly (e.g., National Center for Education Statistics; Lomotey & Smith, 2023) signal that it is important to examine our own practices in the service of ameliorating as opposed to exacerbating existing gaps. Program and service engagement by student race and ethnicity can be challenging to report, as units balance a desire to invite students to describe their identity fully and completely with a duty to protect student privacy and desires to report in a manner that is consistent with broader institutional norms. In addition, best practices for collecting and integrating engagement data with information about student racial and ethnic identity are not always established or clear.

One approach is to pull information about student racial/ethnic identity from institutional records data and integrate those data with unit program and service engagement information. The Registrar’s Office maintains a data dictionary that describes how students’ self-identified race/ethnicity is represented in institutional records (see, ethnic group, ethnicity detail entries in this data dictionary), and links to information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) about how information about student race and ethnicity is collected and reported to the federal government. By leveraging institutional records data, units do not need to add questions to student surveys to learn students’ race/ethnicity information, and can be confident that they are reporting race/ethnicity information in a way that is consistent with institutional and national practices.

Duke’s IPEDS race/ethnicity data are publicly available via the National Center for Education Statistics. In addition, Duke shares enrollment information via Duke Facts. You can use these data to help determine the extent to which the students served by your unit reflect the undergraduate population here at Duke by comparing the proportion of students who connect with your programs and services in each race/ethnicity category to that of the broader student body.

One downside of race/ethnicity data derived from fixed-choice categories to is that they may not reflect how students would describe their own racial or ethnic identity. Not having one’s identity represented in fixed-choice category response options can lead to identity denial experiences (e.g., Sanchez, 2010; Townsend et al., 2009). An alternative approach, which we often take in OUE Research projects, is to use an open-ended response format where students can self-describe their own racial and ethnic identity. While this approach has the considerable upside of allowing students to describe their own identities in a way that feels true for them, the downside can be that such open-ended responses do not always allow for an exact match with institutional and federal reporting conventions.

Although there is no perfect solution, examining program and service engagement by student identities (including race/ethnicity) allows us to examine the degree to which we’re equitably reaching and supporting students. If you have questions about assessment and reporting, including wanting help finding race/ethnicity information for the students you serve, or to have more detailed population-level data for subsets of the undergraduate population (e.g., first- and second-year students in Trinity), please reach out to us in OUE Research. We are here to help!