Racial and Economic Stratification on Campus: The Relationship between Luxury Residence Halls, Race, and Academic Outcomes

Abstract

Racial and Economic Stratification on Campus:The Relationship between Luxury Residence Halls, Race, and Academic Outcomes Joshua Travis Brown (bio), Fred Volk (bio), and Joseph M. Kush (bio) Residence hall design has remained an important topic for higher education professionals, but recently it has garnered attention from audiences beyond the postsecondary sector, including policymakers, donors, and media. In the competitive realm of enrollment management, luxury residence hall designs that emphasize high-end amenities and private rooms are vital in attracting certain prospective students (McClure, 2019). The design of luxury residence halls has created tension between the ideals of equitable educational experiences and increased competition to attract enrollment, as such facilities are often priced beyond the financial reach of students whose presence is essential to creating a diverse educational experience for all students. Rather than creating a more diverse environment, residence hall design has been shown to promote racial and economic stratification in living spaces (Foste, 2021). One form of racialized pattern in student housing is homophily, which is the grouping of students by race or class that permits (or limits) opportunities to interact with persons "like me" (McPherson et al., 2001). Yet, interacting with others of a similar race and economic background has been shown to result in better academic outcomes (Brown et al., 2019). Some researchers found residence hall design played no role in college experiences (Bronkema & Bowman, 2017), while others found isolating designs to be less conducive to flourishing and associated with poorer academic outcomes for Black students when examining Black/White differences (Brown et al., 2019). As university leaders face pressures to increase enrollment, some have allocated millions of dollars to attracting students using a new type of luxury residence hall design—hybrid luxury—that combines high-end amenities and high socialization design (Cramer, 2021; Eligon, 2013). While hybrid luxury halls emphasize added amenities such as coffee lounges, co-working spaces, and exclusive resident-only fitness studios, they also incorporate certain design elements to strategically increase patterns of student socialization. What remains unknown is (a) how emerging hybrid luxury designs may be associated with academic outcomes and (b) whether student academic outcomes differed in other forms of residence hall designs conditioned on race and homophily [End Page 108] opportunity. The focus of this work takes up these two questions. METHOD Data used in this study were drawn from archival records of a large, predominantly white institution in the Eastern US. We restricted the sample to first-semester undergraduate students and further eliminated NCAA athlete students, international students, or persons 21 years of age or older. This resulted in a sample size retrieved over seven years of 17,640 incoming first-year students. See Table 1 for demographic details of the full sample. First-semester GPA was the outcome measure for analyses, while covariates included high school GPA (a predictor of first-semester GPA) and estimated family contribution (EFC; a measure of household ability to contribute to college costs calculated from the FAFSA). Three distinct residence hall architectures were examined (i.e., traditional corridor, suite, and hybrid luxury) with a differentiated price range of $3,400 between the least and most expensive designs. Four racial/ethnic categories were included in the study (i.e., White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American) and used to calculate homophily opportunity for each residence hall based on the percentage of residents with racial similarities. For example, if a student indicated their race was Black, their calculated homophily opportunity was equivalent to the percentage of Black students in their residence hall. We used OLS regression to assess two basic models with first-semester academic performance as the outcome. Based on prior research, we included race, residence hall design, and homophily opportunity as our focal predictors (Brown et al., 2019). The two-model approach permits an incremental examination of complex social factors where each model includes controls for high school academic performance and economic status. The first model included two residence hall designs and controlled for economic status to examine fundamental gaps in the literature. The second model considers three categories of residence hall design to examine how hybrid luxury designs may be associated with academic outcomes and whether academic outcomes differed in other forms...