The Campus Social Class Climate

Will Barratt, PhD
Adventurer 

Why is campus social class climate important?

Campus racial climate is getting a lot of deserved attention lately. On the other hand I recall in the spring of 1969 (yes, I am that old) that campus racial climate got highlighted quite loudly and publicly because of black student activism and black student organizations. It's been more than 50 years and we are still having these conversation on campus. Really? Did campus leaders learn nothing? What about foregrounding women on campus? Hispanics? GLBTQ students, faculty, staff and administrators? These issues have been foregrounded and backgrounded for at least a half century. So, why is social class ignored?

Issues of first generation students came to the campus with the advent of the Land Grant institutions, again in post WWII, again with the rise of vocational technical education, and again with recent awareness of campus demographics. The primary modality for dealing with any campus minority group member has been assimilation and not accommodation. Pre-enrollment and enrichment programs are a mainstay, and data supported, assimilation programming effort for first generation students on campus.

Is assimilation enough. Have these first generation students been took, hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok? (See Malcolm X Movie speech.) With the number of scholars attending to first generation students, the sleeping campus social class giant issues are being woken.

Commentary about social class on campus has been a mainstay of the post-secondary education literature in the US (Bourdieu, Payne, Barratt, Van Galen, Ardoin). Action about social class on campus has been rare. Elite private schools and flagship state universities fight over offering economic enticements to the high scoring, high grade, low income kids. That's about the extent of the action. Knowledge about social class on campus has been limited to demographic descriptions: percent of Pell Grant students, percent of legacy students, average parental income, and the like (College Navigator). 

Step zero

Ask the right question."What is the social class climate of your campus?"

Any physical space designer knows the power of context in stimulating, or suppressing, behavior. The campus physical, social, interpersonal, and demographic environment has a profound effect on students. When the effect of the campus environment is retention or departure, we need to pay attention to the causes of retention and departure. Students who depart are no longer learning in classes.

The environment is critical. Kurt Lewin famously wrote B = f (P,E) to focus thinking that behavior - B - is a function - f - of person - P - and environment - E. This formula morphed into the B P E triangle used by Bandura in describing reciprocal determinism. Barker explored Person - Environment interactions at the Midwest Ecological Field Station, ignoring the behavior and person distinction. Banning morphed Lewin's formula into B = f (PxE) to highlight the person-environment interaction. My favorite is Louis Pasteur's deathbed statement “I was wrong. The germ is nothing. The terrain is everything.”.

A Caveat - The terrain is important. And the map is not the territory, to paraphrase a principle of General Semantics. Campus social class climate is one map of the campus, it is not the campus. Is a weak map better than no map? Absolutely yes. Information, even weak information, is good, is useful. Graphing maps our data, and the graph is not the data. College Navigator includes lots of information, and the information is not the campus. City maps feature roads, or public transportation routes, or the electrical grid, or whatever layers of Geographic Information Systems you want, but these maps are not the city. Even Google Earth has layers that you can select. Good Institutional Research offices have massive amounts of data, often under-analyzed and under-used, and that data is not the campus. The campus 'fact sheet' is hardly enough. A few narratives from 'typical students' is hardly enough. 

The Campus Social Class Climate Map

Climate is the look and feel of a campus - basically what is experienced on campus (socially, intellectually, aesthetically, etc.). We can collect that data from a lot of people using a survey, aggregate it, and make some statements about the collective perception of the campus climate. Further, we can divide people into groups (gender for example, recognizing that gender is a non-binary idea, but for the sake of analysis we just ignore that inconvenient truth) and describe how different groups perceive the campus climate differently - and we would infer that this reflects their experiences on campus.

What are the layers of a good Campus Information System? Certainly social class should be one layer.

Why is social class data/information ignored on campus? Every campus has the data, and it's as if no one is looking. There is a blinking red light on the campus data dashboard that no one notices.

Person-environment fit is a important. The work satisfaction and turnover literature tells us that people quit bosses (bad interpersonal environments) and not jobs. Students walk away from college for many reasons, one reason is fit. "Seeing people like me" is an important consideration for many students when choosing to go to college, where to go to college, and whether or not to stay. Is it any wonder that the drop-out rate for first generation students is nearly twice that for second generation students? Is having faculty and staff wear "I'm first generation" buttons enough? Well, at least the buttons make the invisible viable. 

What does the data say?

A classic human data collection problem is that humans are inherently biased - we see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. Selective attention affects us all, so when we are asked about the world around us we respond based on the world we perceive. The same problem holds for self report - the Dunning-Kruger effect (very ignorant people have very high opinions of their knowledge, for example) is a real worry in every psychological study. Personal perception of the world around us is a human problem. On the other hand, we can use demographic variables (gender, ethnicity, social class, religion, etc.) to explore different perceptions.

Hard Work

Exploring campus environments, or any environment, is fraught with difficulty. I am reminded of the legend "Here be dragons" on old maps. Banning and Strange explored campus environments in Designing for Learning. They used physical, aggregate, organizational, and socially constructed environments as analytical lenses. These authors build from the work of Walsh who wrote "Theories of Person-Environment Interaction" in 1973. Indeed, the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Psychology contains many ways to explore the worlds in which we find ourselves and many ways to understand that world, from phenomenological psychology to systems theory. 

What is the right question? Should we focus on the campus Aesthetic environment, Cultural environment, Human aggregate environment, Intellectual environment, Perceptual environment, Physical environment, Interpersonal environment?

Campus climate is complex. Identifying what is important to measure and what is important to those trying to understand campus climate is tough. Too often "I'll know it when I see it" is what decision makers use as a rationale to define what they want. Too often, their conscious and unconscious biases focus their attention.

Lenses - Physical environment, social environment, interpersonal environment, and demographic environment lenses make a nice short list of data to collect. And, all of the data is perceptual - as in "How do you see the physical campus?". Our perceptions are guided by our life experiences and people with different social class background experiences will perceive the campus based on their experiences and meaning making. Analyzing perceptual data against 'objective' data (campus demographics) will make an interesting multidimensional map of campus - and will not be the campus.

So what?

Good management decisions are based on good information. We have emerging good data on campus racial climate. We do not yet have good data on campus social class climate.