Mapping Diversity in Higher Education through Historical Sources and GIS

Susie Pak, St. John's University
Luke Cregan, University of Oxford

In recent years, there has been an explosion of diversity and inclusivity initiatives in higher education. As in the corporate world, these efforts are typically ahistorical--meaning they focus on best practices with minimal analysis of an institution's historical changing makeup using primary data. This is a problem because universities are distinct in terms of their origin, their makeup, their organization, and their locations. They are products of past decisions and circumstances, and they do not arrive at the moment of confronting the issue of diversity and inclusion at the same time in their histories or for the same reasons. Fundamentally, their histories are not generalizable, and thus, their issues dealing with the challenge of inclusion is not either. A barrier to studying universities in the United States is that they most likely kept sporadic demographic records on their student body before 1977 when they were required to track race and ethnicity by the Department of Education. (Tracking gender may have started much earlier). If the data do exist, they are likely not available in digital form and must be translated. This paper studies this process and offers an example of how we can build a picture of a university's changing makeup by cross-checking independent sources from college catalogs, yearbooks, obituaries, alumni records, the decennial census, Sanborn maps, and GIS technology. It will also show how when this process is repeated across selected comparable universities and time periods, we can then also answer other questions, such as what makes a university unique from its peers by comparing their student bodies over time and space. From these sources we can then better study what universities had in common, indicating possible larger trends in higher education.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 138. Emerging Methods: Project Reflections