The Merits of Diversity: Individual and Collective Logics of Diversity in German, American, British, and Indian Higher Education

• In Event: Social Stratification and Student Outcomes

Proposal

Background and Motivation:
Since World War II, universities have played an important role in espousing and enacting inclusion worldwide (Meyer et al. 2007; Frank and Meyer 2020; Schofer and Meyer 2005). Today, publicly endorsing “diversity” is a mandate for any university seeking legitimacy in a global higher education market (Kwak et al. 2019). Yet at the same, universities are also seen as beacons of excellence; they are meant to attract and produce the “best and brightest” and be centers of innovation and problem solving (Owen-Smith 2020). Higher education systems around the world have historically managed this duality in various ways: In the United Kingdom and the United States – until very recently – diversity was legally recognized as an educational boon that fostered critical thinking and problem solving (Moses and Chang 2006). In Germany, calls for gender equality were increasingly integrated into measures of global competitiveness (Zippel et al. 2016). In India, a reservation system, where slots are reserved for individuals from specific castes and groups, has been enshrined in the constitution since the 1950s (Gupta 2006). Today, however, diversity initiatives have been subject to fierce backlash, with many critics alleging that diversity initiatives compromise excellence; in short, universities are under unprecedented pressure to justify the merits of diversity.
Whereas previous research has investigated whether diversity is to be understood as a matter of talent-acquisition or social justice (e.g. Philippczyck et al. 2024), our study investigates whether universities endorse an individual or group-level approach to achieving greater diversity. Who is the target of diversity efforts? Are universities focused on offering tailored support to each individual, or do they focus their attention on the empowerment of entire groups? Both of these approaches provide societal benefits, but the former is more closely linked with meritocratic principles of equal opportunity, whereas the latter is more associated with justice-inspired approaches (Soysal 2023). In investigating the strategies embedded in diversity texts, we offer novel insight into how universities conceptualize diversity and meritocracy in tandem.

Data and Proposed Analysis
We investigate these logics by analyzing the scraped text data from universities in four national contexts: the US (N = 261), the United Kingdom (N = 164), Germany (N = 328), and India (N = 250). These four countries vary in their global stature and how they have historically sought to advance equity efforts in higher education. The US and UK are trendsetters, their universities regularly placing in top global ranks. Germany’s higher education system is at a moment of global ambition, seeking to elevate especially its “Excellence” universities (Menter et al. 2018). Indian higher education system is currently in a massification stage, now educating more of its citizens, including women, after having sent many of its students abroad (Henderson et al. 2023). The US, historically, relied on affirmative action policies to bolster the standing of particular groups, most notably African Americans (Bowen and Bok 1997). In contrast, the UK has outlawed “positive discrimination”. Instead, the UK relies on “positive action,” where institutions are permitted to provide tailored support to those with protected characteristics under the 2010 Equality Act. In India, approaches to achieving diversity have been focused on the level of groups and castes, with the reservation system allocating set proportions of admission slots for members of “backward” groups (Weisskopf 2004). And in Germany, most equality efforts have been focused on the promotion of women, through fellowships, mentoring programs, and “family friendliness” initiatives (Zippel et al. 2016).
We focus on university websites to comprise our text data because webpages are the primary place where universities broadcast their intentions and values and engage in reputation management (Gavrila and Ramirez 2019). We collect all text data available from websites linked to the university webpage, as we expect diversity management work to be evident on the “outer layers” of university websites (Christensen et al. 2018).
We take an iterative approach to analyzing our data, first inductively surfacing individual and collective statements through hand coding (N = 200) in each national context before training a Large Language Model to identify all texts at scale. Our inter-rater agreement exceeded the standard threshold of 85% and the large language model codes near 80% agreement with our human classification; we are further refining the model to attain 85% agreement. This approach is in keeping with the grounded computational theory method (Nelson 2020), a gold standard method in mixed method computational social science. Illustrative statements are provided below.

Individual Logic: “[University] strives for its campuses to be free of any discrimination that diminishes individual dignity, and impedes educational opportunities, equal access to freedom of academic inquiry and employment opportunities.”

Collective Logic: “We are striving to build an inclusive community where our students, staff and visitors feel welcomed and valued and where people’s experiences and outcomes are equitable across groups.”

These data form the basis of our analysis, which will quantitatively show cross-national and intra-national resonances and distinctions. Accounting for institutional characteristics, we will furthermore show how these logics differ by university global ranking, age, size, and international student body. Finally, we propose additional analyses revealing whether individual or collective logics underlie the advocacy of specific groups or identities (e.g. are individual logics more readily used for those with disabilities rather than women?). In sum, this study provides comparative insight into the contestation of meritocracy and diversity as global values amidst a volatile time in the global higher education field.

Contribution:
This study promises to contribute to established debates regarding the utilities and benefits conferred by universities, especially as it relates to efforts to increase access and inclusion. We depart from previous scholarship that has focused on whether education and diversity are understood as commodities to be enjoyed by the individual (Warikoo 2016), or a matter of social justice to be enjoyed by all (Labaree 1997, Philippczyck et al. 2024). In contrast, our study investigates how diversity is to be achieved – whether focused on investments in the individual or entire groups – offering insights into how meritocracy and diversity are to be achieved in tandem.

Authors

• Sonia Giebel, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

• Yasemin Soysal, WZB Berlin Social Science Center