Study Suggests Interracial Roommate Assignments Help Diversity Efforts

A study of Berea College students has found that white students who were randomly assigned black roommates as freshmen had a significantly larger proportion of black friends over their time in college than white peers whose first-year roommate was also white. A paper summarizing the study cautions that it focuses on just one institution and student relations may be different elsewhere. Nevertheless, it says, the Berea findings suggest that students may begin college with misperceptions of incompatibility with students of other races that certain forms of interracial contact can help alleviate. The authors of the study are Todd R. Stinebrickner, a professor of economics, and Braz Camargo, an assistant professor of economics,  both at the University of Western Ontario, and Ralph Stinebrickner, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Berea College.