Project Description:
There are two main projects I’d like to have Summer Research Students work on: 1) “Fit and Belonging in College” and 2) “Perceived Status of Majors”. Brief Overview of “Fit and Belonging in College”: Over the past decade, “belonging” has become a buzzword across American college campuses as it has been found that belonging is essential for student success and persistence in college. MSIs, like Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), have had a long history of successfully serving the needs of URM students. For example, HBCUs make up only 3% of all colleges in the US, yet they enroll about 11% of all Black students and grant 25% of bachelor’s degrees to Black students. This makes MSI’s like HBCUs extremely important sites for understanding the development of URM students’ feelings of fit and belonging. This is despite the fact that MSIs like HBCUs enroll a disproportionately high percent of first-generation, low-income students who likely would not have attended college otherwise. For example, 71% of HBCU students are Pell-eligible compared to the national average of 49% of all students. The high enrollment of at-risk students accounts for why HBCUs experience lower retention and graduation rates compared to the national average, despite creating culturally supportive environments. Supporting the most-at-risk students likely creates a dueling set of pressures on students’ feelings of fit and belonging on campus. On the one hand, feeling supported in a racially homogenous community that has the know-how and the mission to culturally engage and support them is an important means of fostering inspiration, comfort and safety that go hand-in-hand with feelings of fit and belonging. On the other hand, a context where students witness a high percentage of friends and classmates derailed from graduation (for example, HBCU’s on average have a 30% graduation rate) may inhibit feelings of fit and belonging as students both directly and vicariously experience anxiety, stress, and frustration living out their academic and social lives. Understanding how students perceive and balance these conflicting factors in developing a sense of fit and belonging at MSIs is important, particularly as many experts predict there will be a large uptick in URM applications to HBCUs and other MSIs in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to ban Affirmative Action in college admissions this summer. In this project, I am looking for help with finding and summarizing background literature about fit and belonging at either HBCUs, MSIs, or Work Colleges, and to learn more about some potential Fall site for data collection. Brief Overview of “Perceived Status of Major Fields”: It is likely not a surprise, but undergraduates consistently rank the humanities as low in perceived status compared to other fields. Pitt & Zhu (2020) examined students’ perceptions of major status across 10 different fields, and found that the humanities ranked third from the bottom. While there is undoubtedly many sources undergirding the perceived status of academic fields, this question of whether stereotypes about the kinds of students who major in a field affect the field’s status is important because the perceived status, or the respect and value attributed to a major may interact with students’ self-concepts and expressed motivations for choosing or rejecting that major. The perceived status of a major may symbolize important personal characteristics that students want others to know that they hold or are cultivating. Status allows others to make attributions-not just of personal competence like here-when studying a quote unquote “hard” field, but also work ethic and values, such as attributions of morality and altruism. However, perceived traits, preferences, and values are also inherently gendered and racialized-which should affect a field’s status both directly and indirectly. I am interested in ways that the sociodemographic composition of field is related to how students describe stereotypes and the status of the people in the major-both directly, but also in coded gendered or racialized language. In this project, I am looking for help examining focus group data to see how students describe their expectations or perceptions of the people who enter into different kinds of majors (Arts & Humanities, STEM, Business) and the perceived status of these types of majors.
Prerequisites
I don’t have prerequisites, but a candidate will be stronger if they have taken introduction to sociology or a prior sociology course.
Special Comments
N/A
Project Information
Estimated Start Date: 6/10/2024
Estimated End Date: 8/16/2024
Maximum number of students sought: 4
Contact Information: Prof. Lynn Chin (chinl@wlu.edu)