A new survey of black, Hispanic, and Native American college students has found that 74 percent believe colleges need to find better ways to bring students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds together to socialize and study.

An overwhelming majority — 64 percent — said that, when they were choosing which college to attend, it was at least somewhat important to them that the institution’s students socialized and studied together on a regular basis. But while 24 percent reported witnessing more such interactions between racial and ethnic groups than they had expected when applying, 16 percent said they had witnessed less.

The survey results were released to The Chronicle by Widmeyer Communications, a research and polling firm with offices in Washington and New York. The survey was conducted online in August, using a sample of 582 black, Hispanic, and Native American college students and 400 high-school students from those racial and ethnic groups. The survey pool was vetted by the National Research Center for College and University Admissions and SurveyU, a New York-based polling firm.

The survey found that 68 percent of the college students polled said it was at least somewhat important to them in choosing a college that an institution “had students from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds.” Such diversity was rated as “one of the most important things” by 12 percent of the students in the sample.

Asked to characterize what they had actually experienced on their campus, 35 percent said they had encountered more diversity than expected, while 19 percent said they had seen less.

The high-school students surveyed placed even more emphasis on college diversity, with 81 percent saying it was at least somewhat important to them that a prospective college’s students come from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Two-thirds expected to encounter more diversity in college than they had experienced in high school. —Peter Schmidt