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HOUSE AD HERE

Beyond Access: Explaining Socioeconomic Differences in College Transfer

SARA GOLDRICK-RAB AND FABIAN T. PFEFFER

College Proximity:Mapping Access to Opportunity

RUTH N. LÓPEZ TURLEY

The Downside of Social Closure: Brokerage, Parental Influence, and Delinquency Among

African American BoysWILLIAM MANGINO

Interracial Friendships in the Transition to College:Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together Once They Leave

the Nest?ELIZABETH STEARNS, CLAUDIA BUCHMANN, AND KARA

BONNEAU

Scholars from around the world will travel to the ASA Annual Meeting in San Francisco this summer. The 104th Annual Meeting will be an intellectual conversation that offers focused educational sessions by leading scholars, networking opportunities, and professional develop-ment solutions from experts in the field. Connect, learn, and share with colleagues as we explore the program theme: The New Politics of Community.

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American Sociological Association1430 K Street NW, Suite 600Washington, DC 20005(202) 383-9005 • Fax (202) [email protected] • www.asanet.org

MISSION STATEMENT: The journal provides a forum for studies in sociology of education and human social develop-ment throughout the life cycle. It publishes research from all methodologies that examines how social institutions andindividuals’ experiences in these institutions affect educational processes and social development. Such research mayspan various levels of analysis, from the individual to the structure of relations among social and educational institutions,and may encompass all stages and types of education at the individual, institutional, and organizational levels.

Hanna AyalonTel Aviv University

Pamela R. BennettJohns Hopkins University

William J. CarbonaroUniversity of Notre Dame

Wade M. ColeMontana State University

Elizabeth C. CookseyOhio State University

Susan A. DumaisLouisiana State University

Cynthia FelicianoUniversity of California–Irvine

Sara Goldrick-RabUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

Eric GrodskyUniversity of California–Davis

Angel Lou HarrisPrinceton University

Joseph C. HermanowiczUniversity of Georgia

Charles HirschmanUniversity of Washington

Sylvia HurtadoUCLA

Douglas Lee LauenUniversity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Kevin T. LeichtUniversity of Iowa

Samuel R. LucasUniversity of California–Berkeley

Daniel A. McFarlandStanford University

Lynn M. MulkeyUniversity of South Carolina–Beaufort

Brian PowellIndiana University

Kelly RaleyUniversity of Texas

Sean F. ReardonStanford University

John R. SchwilleMichigan State University

Salvatore SaporitoCollege of William and Mary

Christopher B. SwansonEditorial Projects in Education

Tony TamChinese University of Hong Kong

Edward E. TellesUniversity of California–Los Angeles

Marta TiendaPrinceton University

Sarah TurnerUniversity of Virginia

Karolyn TysonUniversity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Julia WrigleyCUNY Graduate Center

MANAGING EDITORWendy Almeleh

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT GRADUATE STUDENT EDITORSJeff Keesler Nathan D. Jones and Timothy G. Ford

EXECUTIVE OFFICERSally T. Hillsman

SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION (ISSN 0038-0407) is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October by theAmerican Sociological Association, 1430 K Street, N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005-2529, and is printed byBoyd Printing Company, Albany, New York. Periodicals postage is paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailingoffices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Sociology of Education, 1430 K Street, N.W., Suite 600, Washington,DC 20005-2529.

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The American Sociological Association acknowledges, with appreciation, the facilities and assistance provided byMichigan State University.

EDITORBarbara Schneider, Michigan State University

DEPUTY EDITORJohn Robert Warren, University of Minnesota

SOCIOLOGYOF

EDUCATIONVolume 82 April 2009 Number 2

Contents

Beyond Access: Explaining Socioeconomic Differences in College TransferSARA GOLDRICK-RAB AND FABIAN T. PFEFFER 101

College Proximity: Mapping Access to OpportunityRUTH N. LÓPEZ TURLEY 126

The Downside of Social Closure: Brokerage, Parental Influence, and Delinquency Among African American BoysWILLIAM MANGINO 147

Interracial Friendships in the Transition to College:Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together Once They Leave the Nest?

ELIZABETH STEARNS, CLAUDIA BUCHMANN, AND KARA BONNEAU 175

NOTICE TO CONTRIBUTORS

Editorial ProceduresAll papers considered appropriate for this journal are reviewed anonymously. To ensure anonymity, authors’names, institutional affiliations, and other identifying material should be placed on the title page only. Papersare accepted for publication subject to nonsubstantive, stylistic editing. A copy of the edited paper is sent tothe author for final review. Proofs of articles are sent only to authors who reside in the United States.Submission of a paper to a professional journal is considered an indication of the author’s commitment topublish in that journal. A paper submitted to this journal while it is under review for another journal will notbe accepted for review.

Preparation and Submission of Manuscripts.1. Type all copy (including indented material, references, and footnotes) double-spaced in no smaller than

12-point type using 11/2-inch margins on all sides.2. Type each table on a separate page. Insert a note in the text indicating where the table should appear.3. On an article’s acceptance, submit camera-ready art for all figures, rendered on a laser printer or as

glossy prints or electronic format.4. Include an abstract of no more than 100 words.5. Submit four copies of the paper and retain the original for your files. Enclose a stamped, self-addressed

postcard so we can acknowledge receipt of your paper.6. A check or money order for $25.00, payable to the American Sociological Association, must accom-

pany each submission. This fee is waived for papers written by student members of the ASA. The sub-mission fee reflects a policy of the ASA Council and Committee on Publications, which affects all ASAjournals. It is a reluctant response to the accelerating costs of manuscript processing.

Reference Format1. In the text: All references to books, articles, and other works should be identified at the appropriate point

in the text by the surname of the author and year of publication; add page numbers only when citingstatistics or direct quotes. Endnotes should be used only for substantive observations and explanations.Subsequent citations of a source should be identified in the same way; do not use “ibid.,” “op. cit.,” or“loc. cit.”a. If the author’s name is part of the narrative, place only the year of publication in parentheses:

Duncan (1959). Otherwise, place both the name and the year, with no intervening punctuation,in parentheses: (Duncan 1959).

b. Insert page numbers, preceded by a colon after the year of publication: (Kuhn 1970:120–45).c. If the work cited has three or fewer authors, list all authors in the first citation; thereafter, include

only the name of the first author followed by “et al.” If the work has four or more authors, includeonly the name of the first author followed by “et al.” in all citations.

d. Abbreviate or shorten the names of institutional or corporate authors, making sure that the textcitation and the entry in the reference list begin with the same element.

e. Distinguish two or more works by the same author with the same publication date by appendingletters (a, b, c) to the date: (Levy 1965a).

f. Separate a series of references with semicolons and enclose them in a single pair of parentheses:(Featherman and Hauser 1979; Coleman et al. 1982; U.S. Bureau of Census 1981).

2. In the Reference List: List all entries alphabetically by author and, within author, by year of publication.List all authors in citations of multiauthor works; do not use “et al.” in the reference list.

Examples follow:Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” Pp. 487–511 in Power and Ideology

in Education, edited by J. Karabel and A.H. Halsey. New York: Oxford University Press.Coleman, James S., Thomas Hoffer, and Sally B. Kilgore. 1982a. “Cognitive Outcomes in Public and Private

Schools.” Sociology of Education 55:65–76.——. 1982b. High School Achievement: Public, Catholic and Other Private Schools Compared. New York: Basic.Mare, Robert D. 1979. “Change and Stability in Educational Stratification.” Paper presented at the annual

meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston.Marx, Karl (1867) 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by S. Moore and E. Aveling. New York: International.U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1979. 1970 Census Population and Housing. Fourth Count Population Summary

Tape. Machine-readable data file. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census (producer). Rosslyn, VA:DUALabs (distributor).

Interracial Friendships in the Transition toCollege:

Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together OnceThey Leave the Nest?

Elizabeth StearnsUniversity of North Carolina at Charlotte

Claudia BuchmannThe Ohio State University

Kara BonneauDuke University

Because of segregation in neighborhoods and schools, college may provide the first opportu-

nity for many young adults to interact closely with members of different racial and ethnic

groups. Little research has examined how interracial friendships form during this period. This

article investigates changes in the racial composition of friendship networks in the transition

from high school to college and how aspects of the college environment are related to such

changes. Interracial friendships increase for whites, decrease for blacks, and show little change

for Latinos and Asians. The habits of friendship formation that are acquired during adolescence

and features of residential and extracurricular college contexts influence the formation of inter-

racial friendships. The race of one’s roommate, the degree of interracial contact in residence

halls, and participation in various types of extracurricular activities are most strongly related to

the formation of interracial friendships.

Sociology of Education 2009, Vol. 82 (April): 173–195 173

The folk saying “birds of a feather flocktogether” reflects sociological truth. Alarge literature on homophily has found

that people tend to form friendships withpeople who are like themselves on manydimensions, including race, age, and socioe-conomic status (SES) (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001). Propinquity—thepropensity to form relationships with otherswho share the same social situation—oftencombines with homophily to produce highlevels of racial homogeneity in social net-works because shared social situations are fre-quently racially homogeneous (Blau andSchwartz 1984; Quillian and Campbell

2003). Although they are relatively uncom-mon in American society, interracial friend-ships do develop.

A great deal of research has examined howinterracial friendships form in elementary andsecondary schools (Cohen 1977; Hallinan1982; Hallinan and Smith 1985; Hallinan andWilliams 1989; Patchen 1982); less is knownabout the development of interracial friend-ships at later stages of the educational career.But understanding how and with whom col-lege students make friends has become espe-cially important in light of contemporarydemographic and policy changes. While theracial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. school-

174 Stearns, Buchmann, and Bonneau

age population is increasing markedly, deseg-regation efforts in elementary and secondaryschools have declined in recent years(Clotfelter 2004; Frankenberg and Lee 2002).Because of geographic segregation in neigh-borhoods (Blau 2003) and social segregationbetween and within schools (Clotfelter 2002,2004; Moody 2001; Quillian and Campbell2003), college may provide the first opportu-nity for many young adults to interact closelyin academic, residential, or social settingswith members of different racial and ethnicgroups.

To achieve one of the central goals ofAmerican higher education—to educate andproduce graduates who have the skills andmotivation to take the lead in a diverse demo-cratic society—many colleges and universitieshave sought to ensure that their communitiesare racially diverse. But research has foundthat racially diverse student bodies are a nec-essary but not sufficient condition for stu-dents to realize the educational benefits ofattending diverse institutions (e.g., Astin1993; Bowen and Bok 1998; Chang 1999;Gurin et al. 2002; Hurtado 2001; Pascarella etal. 1996). This research has suggested thatvarious features of college environments maypromote or limit the extent to which studentshave meaningful interracial contact duringcollege. Although none of the foregoing stud-ies focused specifically on interracial friend-ship, friendship is one aspect of meaningfulinterracial contact that Gurin et al.(2002:333) termed “informal interactionaldiversity.” Gurin et al. found that informalinteractional diversity predicts learning out-comes, such as intellectual engagement andacademic skills, as well as democracy-relatedoutcomes, such as engagement in citizenshipand increased racial/cultural awareness. Thus,it is important to examine how the structureof educational institutions influences oppor-tunities for forming interracial friendships andto understand how students’ tendencies toform racially homophilous friendships playout within these structures.

Most prior studies of college students’friendships have been either merely descrip-tive or have focused exclusively on the friend-ships of minority students in predominantlywhite colleges. These studies have found that

the most salient characteristic of college stu-dents’ friendships is that they arehomophilous with respect to race (Massey etal. 2003; Smith and Moore 2000). Whitestend to have friendship networks that areoverwhelmingly white, while blacks have net-works that are more diverse than those ofwhites; Asians and Latinos have networks thatare somewhat more diverse than those ofwhites and blacks.

Three recent studies have moved beyonddescription to assess empirically the factorsthat promote interracial friendships in col-lege. Examining the frequency of e-mail cor-respondence at a highly selective private uni-versity, Marmaros and Sacerdote (2006)found that residential proximity and raceboth influence the frequency of e-mail corre-spondence. They did not examine the overallracial composition of students’ networks orfactors that may influence such composition.Boisjoly et al. (2006) found that white stu-dents who had black roommates during theirfirst year of college were more likely to reportbeing comfortable interacting with membersof other racial groups later in college. Theynoted no significant differences in the interra-cial friendships between whites who had dif-ferent-race roommates and those who didnot, but they studied only whites and did notmeasure changes in the racial composition offriendship networks over time. Another studythat was limited to whites, by Mark and Harris(2008), found that white students with differ-ent-race roommates reported interracialfriendships more frequently than did thosewith white roommates.

This article examines the formation ofinterracial friendships among college stu-dents. In contrast to other recent research, itexplores the racial composition of friendshipnetworks in college for several racial groupsand pays particular attention to how friend-ship networks change during the transitionfrom high school to college. We use datafrom the Campus Life and Learning Project,which follows students from the summer afterhigh school through their first year at a high-ly selective private research university withapproximately 6,000 undergraduate studentsin the southern United States. These data pro-vide a unique opportunity to address several

Interracial Friendships in the Transition to College 175

questions: How does the racial compositionof friendship networks of young adults fromdifferent racial backgrounds change as theyoung adults move from high school to col-lege? Do prior experiences with interracialfriendship increase students’ proclivity toform interracial friendships in college? Howare various aspects of the college environ-ment related to the racial composition of stu-dents’ friendship networks? Answers to thesequestions are important because they indi-cate the degree to which theoretical perspec-tives that have been used to understand theformation of interracial friendships in elemen-tary and secondary schools extend to suchprocesses at the college level. They can alsoilluminate clear policy strategies for collegeand university administrators who are seekingto foster positive interracial interactionsamong students. In light of the importance ofracial diversity in students’ college experi-ences for shaping their attitudes and behaviorlater in life (Bowen and Bok 1998), there isgreat value in understanding which institu-tional approaches are more effective or lesseffective in fostering interracial friendships.

In the following section, we review the lit-erature on two central organizing processesin the study of friendship formation inAmerican schools—homophily and propin-quity—and apply these concepts to an analy-sis of interracial friendship networks amongcollege students. We focus on howhomophilous tendencies that are manifestedboth before and during college, as well aspropinquity in three realms of the collegeenvironment—residence halls, classrooms,and extracurricular activities—are related tothe racial composition of students’ friendshipnetworks in the first year of college. In dis-cussing propinquity, we draw on Allport’s(1954) contact theory, which elaborates howspecific features of a social setting may makeinteraction more likely. We then generate andtest hypotheses regarding homophily andpropinquity as separate influences, as well asintersecting and overlapping processes thatshape interracial friendships in complex anddiverse institutions.

THEORIES OF FRIENDSHIP FORMATION

Homophily and propinquity both influencethe process of friendship formation. Researchon interracial friendships in elementary andsecondary schools has consistently found thatstudents tend to make racially homophilousfriendship choices; they are more likely tobecome friends with members of their ownrace than with members of other racialgroups (Hallinan and Williams 1989). Whiteyouths are much less likely than are youths ofother racial groups to form interracial friend-ships, even in racially diverse schools (Joynerand Kao 2000; Quillian and Campbell 2003).

Propinquity, or the tendency to formfriendships based on shared social situations,also plays a role in the formation of friend-ships. With its basis in propinquity, contacttheory discusses the mechanisms underlyingsocial settings that make friendship more like-ly. Specifically, it attends to the context inwhich the interaction occurs and predictsthat positive relations, such as friendshipsbetween members of two groups, are morelikely if the groups interact with one anotherunder three particular conditions (Allport1954). First, members of different groupsneed to have the opportunity to interact insituations where group members have equalstatus interactions. Second, cooperative inter-dependence—working collaboratively toward agoal that cannot be achieved independently—increases the likelihood of positive intergrouprelations. Third, positive relations are morelikely if there is explicit support for intergroupmixing from recognized authority figures.

Research on friendships in elementary andsecondary schools has found some supportfor the basic tenets of contact theory(Hallinan and Williams 1989; Kubitschek andHallinan 1998; Moody 2001). There is evi-dence that the likelihood of forming interra-cial friendships increases when children of dif-ferent racial groups have equal-status contactbetween them (Cohen 1977; Hallinan 1982;Hallinan and Williams 1989). In a study ofhigh school friendship segregation, Moody(2001) applied contact theory to examinehow high school structure and organizationinherently affect which students interact with


one another. Emphasizing the importance ofcontact among students in classrooms andextracurricular settings, Moody argued thatteam sports, music and drama, school news-papers, and student government are all activ-ities that involve students working toward acollective goal. He found greater racial inte-gration in schools that promoted interracialmixing within extracurricular activities.

Moody’s research underlines a key pointregarding the intersecting effects of propin-quity and homophily. Propinquity is deter-mined both by individual choices, which maybe strongly influenced by individuals’ propen-sities toward homophily, and by the organi-zational features and policies of the school.For instance, the racial composition of theschool population, the degree of abilitygrouping or academic tracking, and the vari-ety of extracurricular opportunities are relatedto the likelihood of interracial interaction andthe subsequent formation of interracialfriendships (Hallinan and Williams 1989;Kubitschek and Hallinan 1998; Moody 2001;Mouw and Entwisle 2006; Quillian andCampbell 2003). Student choice also influ-ences propinquity, within the constraints oforganizational features of academic environ-ments (Hallinan and Williams 1989), in thathigh school students can choose some oftheir classes and their extracurricular activi-ties.

In racially diverse settings, homophily andpropinquity may work at cross-purposes.Predictions based on homophily would focuson the formation of racially homogeneousfriendship networks. Yet propinquity wouldpredict a greater number of interracial friend-ships (Quillian and Campbell 2003). Theextent to which people come into actual con-tact with one another is key in assessing therelative importance of homophily and propin-quity in racially diverse settings. This contactmay be in contexts of choice, where the indi-viduals choose to come into contact with oneanother, or in contexts of placement, whereorganizational structure and policies ensurethat they do so. Regardless of whether thecontact is by choice, in these racially diversesettings, homophily and propinquity canintersect in different ways to have differentoutcomes, depending on the degree of con-

tact that people have with members of otherracial groups.

INTERRACIAL FRIENDSHIP FORMATION IN COLLEGE

With some modification, perspectives appliedto the study of friendship formation amongschool-age children should prove useful forunderstanding similar processes among collegestudents. The wholesale change that occurs instudents’ lives during their transition to collegemakes this period particularly worthy of study.Students frequently enter college unaccompa-nied by existing friends and, especially in resi-dential colleges, form new friendships withother students. Although most students do notbring their friends with them to college, theydo bring the habits of friendship formation thatthey acquired during childhood and adoles-cence. To the degree that students made racial-ly homophilous friendship choices prior tocoming to college, they are likely to continue todo so in college. Also, we expect that the pat-tern of racial differences in the degree ofhomophily in friendship networks that arefound among high school students holds forcollege students—with white college studentshaving more racially homophilous friendshipnetworks (Joyner and Kao 2000; Quillian andCampbell 2003). These points lead toHypotheses 1 and 2:

Hypothesis 1: College students’ friendshipnetworks consist mostly of same-racefriends.

Hypothesis 2: White students have moreracially homophilous friendship networksthan do other students.

Prior homophilous tendencies may alsoshape students’ probability of forming inter-racial friendships in college. By the time theyare young adults entering college, studentsmay have had experiences with interracialfriendships. Prior positive interactions withmembers of other racial groups may lead to agreater proclivity toward such interactionslater in life, which leads to Hypothesis 3.


Hypothesis 3: Students who have higherproportions of interracial friendships intheir friendship networks prior to collegehave higher proportions of interracialfriendships during their first college year.

Aspects of the college environment shouldalso influence the process of forming interracialfriendships. The general organizing principle ofpropinquity and the specific expectationsderived from contact theory (Allport 1954) maybe especially applicable to the study of friend-ship formation among college studentsbecause of the multifaceted nature of the col-lege environment. Residential college campus-es offer multiple settings for contact, some thatare subject to students’ choice and some thatare the outcome of organizational structuresand policies. First, college students tend toreside together on campus. Residence hallsmay be particularly conducive environmentsfor fostering interracial friendships, given theclose and sustained nature of the contact that isfound in them. The more intimate and informalnature of residence hall life may serve to putroommates and hallmates on an equal footingin terms of status and provide a richer seedbedfor forming friendships relative to the struc-tured, formal settings of college classrooms.Moreover, at universities with diverse studentpopulations, administrators can influence theracial and ethnic composition of residence hallsand dormitory rooms through policies that arerelated to the assignment of residence halls.This is especially true during the first year of col-lege, when students have little input in theselection of roommates or residence halls.When university policies ensure that room-mates are randomly matched with respect torace, support for intergroup mixing from rec-ognized authority figures is made explicit.Extending contact theory to college environ-ments, we predict that residential propinquityand positive interracial contact in residencehalls serve to increase the proportion of interra-cial friendships in students’ friendship networks.These points lead to Hypotheses 4 and 5:

Hypothesis 4: Students who have at least oneroommate of a different race have a higherproportion of interracial friendships than dostudents with same-race roommates.

Hypothesis 5: Students who report positiveinterracial relations in their residence hallshave a higher proportion of interracialfriendships than do students who do notreport such interracial contact in their resi-dence halls.

Contact in college classrooms may alsolead to interracial friendships. Kubitschek andHallinan (1998) found that among highschool students, interracial friendships aremore likely to occur when students areenrolled in the same course of study. The rela-tionship may be similar at the college level,but college students spend substantially lesstime in classrooms than do high school stu-dents. Moreover, while professors are author-ity figures in the classroom, it may not beclear to students whether they value ordemonstrate support for interracial interac-tion in the classroom. College students alsomake some choices regarding their classes,but their choices are constrained by organiza-tional factors, such as course requirements,particularly during their first year of school.Thus for college students, classrooms may beless important sites for interracial friendshipformation than may residence halls.Hypothesis 6 states:

Hypothesis 6: Students in racially heteroge-neous classes have a higher proportion ofinterracial friendships than do those inracially homogeneous classes.

Like high schools students, college studentsalso spend their time in a variety of extracurric-ular activities of their own choosing. Followingcontact theory, when students are working col-laboratively toward a goal that is unattainableby other means, in activities such as studentgovernment, student newspapers and otherpublications, sports, and service clubs, theseactivities may be conducive to the formation ofinterracial friendships (Moody 2001). At thesame time, extracurricular activities in collegemay be less conducive to the formation of inter-racial friendships than extracurricular activitiesin high school. In college, these activities areoften managed solely by students, so the stu-dents may lack authority figures who clearlyvalue interracial relations. They may also be


more hierarchical, with some students fillingleadership roles and others following, thusundermining equal status interaction. Thesepoints lead to Hypothesis 7:

Hypothesis 7: Students who take part inextracurricular activities with goals that areattainable only through cooperation havea higher proportion of interracial friend-ships than do students who do not takepart in such activities.

Homophily and propinquity may alsointersect in ways that shape the racial com-position of students’ friendship networks.Students with strong propensities towardforming racially homophilous friendships canfind racially homogeneous settings even with-in racially diverse institutions. For instance,many universities have clubs that are orga-nized around race, ethnicity, or country of ori-gin. The racial composition of extracurriculargroups should matter, since the degree ofracial homogeneity in any group determinesits potential to integrate or segregate stu-dents of different racial and ethnic groups.We expect that students who exhibithomophilous tendencies and join extracurric-ular organizations that are comprised ofsame-race students would then experiencethe effects of propinquity, such that theywould have fewer interracial friendships laterin their first year of college. In other words,students’ tendencies toward homophily arecompounded by their choices of organiza-tional membership, such that their initialhomophilous leanings intersect with theeffects of propinquity to produce more racial-ly homogeneous friendship networks.

Various types of extracurricular activitiesmay serve to bring students of similar racialand ethnic backgrounds together. At the uni-versity that provided data for this study, 20 ofthe 31 university-recognized student culturalclubs at the time of the survey were orga-nized around race, ethnicity, orcountry/region of origin (e.g., the AsianStudent Association, Black Student Alliance,and Chinese Traditional Dance Club).Although these organizations are open to allstudents, their members may be racially/eth-nically homogeneous, and students who join

these groups may have fewer interracialfriendships if they are members of the racial-ethnic groups that the clubs represent.

Fraternities and sororities are anotherexample of organizations that tend to be eth-nically homogeneous (Chang and DeAngelo2002; Stombler 2004). The specifics of Greeklife at this university provide an opportunityto look at the impact of fraternity and sorori-ty membership on friendship networks insome detail. Black fraternities and sororitieson campus admit students only after the firstyear of college, and there are no traditionallyLatino or Asian Greek organizations on cam-pus. Thus, all students who report havingjoined fraternities or sororities in their firstyear joined traditionally white fraternities andsororities. These points lead to Hypotheses 8aand 8b:

Hypothesis 8a: Black, Asian, Latino, andother students who participate in culturalor ethnically based organizations have alower proportion of interracial friendshipsthan do those who do not participate inthese organizations.

Hypothesis 8b: White students who join fra-ternities and sororities have a lower pro-portion of interracial friendships than dothose who do not join these organizations.

For students who do not makehomophilous choices with respect to theextracurricular organizations that they join,the principle of propinquity predicts that theywill have more interracial friendships. Thus,we expect that students who take part inextracurricular activities with a large numberof members of other races have a higher pro-portion of interracial friendships than dothose who do not take part in such activities,as Hypotheses 9a and 9b indicate:

Hypothesis 9a: White students who partici-pate in cultural or ethnically based organi-zations have a higher proportion of inter-racial friendships than do those who donot participate in these organizations.

Hypothesis 9b: Black, Asian, Latino, andother students who join fraternities and


sororities in their first year of college havea higher proportion of interracial friend-ships than do those who do not join theseorganizations.

In sum, with these hypotheses, we test theinfluence of homophily and propinquity in avariety of different social settings, includingresidence halls and classrooms, and the inter-section of homophily and propinquity on theformation of students’ interracial friendshipsduring their first year of college. We expect tofind that homophily and propinquity haveindependent influences on the formation ofinterracial friendships. In addition, we expectto find that their effects intersect, primarily asa result of the varied racial/ethnic composi-tion of extracurricular contexts in which stu-dents can choose to spend their time. Suchcontexts may give students the opportunityto match homophilous tendencies with theracial/ethnic composition of the peers withwhom they have a great deal of propinquityin extracurricular activities. In testing theseideas, we address substantive research ques-tions regarding how the racial composition ofthe friendship networks of young adults fromdifferent racial backgrounds changes as theyoung adults move from high school to col-lege, whether prior experiences with interra-cial friendship increase students’ proclivitytoward interracial friendships in college, andthe degree to which various aspects of thecollege environment are related to the racialcomposition of students’ friendship networks.

DATA AND METHODS

Data for this study came from the CampusLife and Learning Project (CLL), a multiyearpanel study of two cohorts of students whoenrolled in a highly selective private researchuniversity in 2001 and 2002. From a sam-pling frame of all students who matriculatedin the college of arts and sciences or the engi-neering college, all black and Latino students,about one-third of all white students, andabout two-thirds of all Asian students wererandomly selected for inclusion in the study.1The respondents were first surveyed in thesummer preceding college enrollment.

Approximately 80 percent of the samplecompleted the mail questionnaire, 90 percentof whom also provided signed release formsto their institutional records. Only 2.5 percentof the sample refused to take part. About 65percent of the initial respondents completeda mail questionnaire during the secondsemester of their first year of college. We useddata from the 800 individuals who completedboth the first and second questionnaires andprovided signed release forms to their institu-tional records (57 percent of the originallysampled cohort).2

Although the sample is representative inmany ways of students who attend highlyselective private universities in the UnitedStates (see Appendix Table A1), it is not rep-resentative of the population attending allU.S. colleges and universities, so the resultsmay not be generalizable to a broader popu-lation. But in contrast to studies of multipleinstitutions or nationally representative sam-ples of college students, the CLL study cap-tures rich details of students’ experiences at asingle institution with multiple data pointsand incorporates institutional data that arenot usually available elsewhere. Thus, thedata are valuable for analyzing changes infriendship networks from high school to col-lege and whether aspects of the universityenvironment are related to such changes.

The dependent variable measured theextent to which students had interracialfriendships in the spring semester of the firstyear of college. The questionnaire said:“Other than your immediate family members,think about your closest friends or mostimportant people in your life” and then askedthe respondents to provide information on upto eight of these friends, including their race.3Prior research has demonstrated the validityof this “name generator” approach (Schofieldand Whitley 1983), and it has been usedwidely in data collection efforts, including theNational Longitudinal Study of AdolescentHealth and the General Social Survey. Withthese data, we created a measure of interra-cial friendships, namely, the proportion of thefriendship network that is made up of peoplewhose race is different from that of the stu-dent. The measure is independent of the sizeof the friendship network and can capture


Table 1. Definitions and Descriptive Statistics for All Variables Used in the RegressionAnalysis (N = 800)

Name Description Mean SD

Dependent VariableProportion of different-race

friends Continuous variable ranging from 0 to 1 .399 .364Independent Variables

Female Dummy variable coded 1 if female .574 .495Race Self-reported race of respondent

White Dummy variable coded 1 if white .433 .496Black Dummy variable coded 1 if black .173 .378Latino Dummy variable coded 1 if Latino .159 .366Asian Dummy variable coded 1 if Asian .173 .378Other Dummy variable coded 1 if biracial,

multiracial, or other race .063 .242Socioeconomic Status

Parent’s education in years Number of years of education completed by respondent’smore highly educated parent 18.503 3.153

Family income Income range midpoints: $173,211.80 $147,781.9711 points ranging from $500 to$500,000

Racial Composition of Racial composition of students’ neighborhood and high school. Coded as follows:1 = All or nearly all white2 = Mostly white3 = Half white, half nonwhite4 = Mostly nonwhite5 = All or nearly all nonwhite

High school neighborhood Coded as above. 1.945 1.158High school Coded as above. 2.312 1.010Proportion of different-race

friends—precollege Continuous variable ranging from 0 to 1 .383 .382College Contacts

How often each of the following was present in the respondent’s residence hall. Coded as follows:1 = Never2 = Rarely3 = Sometimes4 = Often5 = Always

Cross racial/ethnic friendships Coded as above. 3.951 .978Intraracial conflict Coded as above. 2.059 .961Interracial tension Coded as above. 1.798 .817Different-race roommate Dummy variable coded 1 if roommate’s

race differed from respondent’s race .495 .500No roommate Dummy variable coded 1 if no roommate .121 .327Classroom composition Average % other race in first four classes

listed 51.450 27.245Fraternity/sorority Dummy variable coded 1 if student

joined a fraternity or sorority .304 .460Cultural/ethnic club Dummy variable coded 1 if student

joined a cultural/ethnic club .286 .452Other club Dummy variable coded 1 if student

joined any other type of club .704 .457


changes in networks concisely. Table 1 pre-sents the definitions and descriptive statisticsfor all the variables used in the analyses.4

To test Hypothesis 3, regarding whetherinterracial friendships during high schoolimprove students’ proclivity to form moreinterracial friendships in college, we includeda measure of the proportion of interracialfriendships in friendship networks prior to col-lege as an independent variable. This variablepertains to friendships reported in the sum-mer before college and generally reflectsfriendships that were formed in high school.It was measured using the same name-gener-ator techniques for the dependent variabledescribed earlier, except that students wereasked to name five friends instead of eight.5

To examine the hypotheses about propin-quity based on contact theory (Hypotheses4–7), we included several measures of thetypes of experiences in college classrooms,residence halls, and extracurricular activities.The students reported the percentage of stu-dents in their classes who were white, andtheir responses were averaged across all theircourses to create a single measure. Theseresponses were reverse coded for whites tocreate a classroom-composition variable thatmeasured the percentage of students of“other races” in their classrooms. Note thatthis measure underestimates the amount ofcontact with other races for members of eth-nic minority groups, since it captures only theproportion of whites in the classroom.

Questions about residential propinquityincluded information on roommates and onthe quality of race relations in students’dorms. Three dummy variables measuredwhether a student had a different-race room-mate, no roommate, or a same-race room-mate. At this university, the assignment ofroommates is random with respect to race.On their housing application, students canstate preferences only for either a coed or asingle-sex dorm floor and a smoking or non-smoking room. In addition, a small number ofathletes can choose to live together, so weexcluded the three athletes in the samplewhose roommate assignments were nonran-dom. The students also reported the preva-lence of cross-racial/ethnic friendships,intraracial conflict, and interracial tension in

their residence halls (see Table 1 for details).These variables are indicators of the extent ofsocial contact, whether negative or positive,in residence halls.

The students also provided information onthe types of extracurricular activities that theyjoined during their first year of college.Information on membership in general typesof extracurricular organizations was used totest Hypothesis 7. This variable is a dichoto-mous measure of whether the student tookpart in various clubs, including student gov-ernment and student media groups, amongothers. Information that the students reportedon their membership in racially identifiabletypes of extracurricular activities formed thebasis for the tests of hypotheses regarding theintersection of college-era homophily andpropinquity (Hypotheses 8 and 9). Becausethe students reported extracurricular activitiesin a set of standard response options, we haveless precise data in this domain than we pre-fer. For instance, the students were askedwhether they belonged to a cultural/ethnicclub but were not asked to specify which par-ticular cultural/ethnic clubs they joined. Thus,we could not test hypotheses about specifictypes of interracial friendships that wereformed in these non-Greek extracurricularactivities (e.g., making more Asian friendsbecause the student joined the Chinese DanceAssociation). From these data, we constructedtwo dummy variables: cultural/ethnic clubmembership (Hypotheses 8a and 9a) and fra-ternity/sorority membership (Hypotheses 8band 9b).

Finally, controls included the respondents’self-reports of race, gender, family income,6and parent’s education, measured as thehighest level of education of either parent.We also included measures of the racial com-position of the students’ high schools and theneighborhoods they lived in during highschool. The respondents reported the per-centage of the population that was white intheir neighborhoods and in their highschools. These two variables were reversecoded for white students, so that they repre-sent the approximate percentage of other-race people in the neighborhoods and highschools. They reflect the notion of opportuni-ties for contact with other racial groups more


accurately for whites than for nonwhites,since for nonwhites, they do not capture thepotential for contact with all other racialgroups. Thus, they may underestimate theextent to which prior contact conditions thetendency to form interracial friendships incollege for blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others.In addition, these measures are only proxiesfor the actual interracial contact that studentshave prior to beginning college. Since manyhigh schools, even relatively diverse highschools, exhibit a degree of racial segregationbecause of academic tracking, extracurricularactivities, and friendship patterns, evenrespondents who attended racially diversehigh schools may not have had much interra-cial contact (Clotfelter 2002; Moody 2001;Stearns 2004). Note also that these measuresindicate the students’ impressions of theracial composition of these contexts.

Analytic Strategy

We began our analysis by comparing race-specific means of the variables measuring therepresentation of different-race friends in thefriendship networks. Then, to determine howpropinquity and homophily influence the for-mation of interracial friendships in the firstyear of college, we conducted multivariateregression analysis on the dependent vari-able, the proportion of different-race friendsin the first year of college. Because this vari-able is a proportion and its residuals are non-normally distributed, ordinary least-squaresregression was not an appropriate analyticchoice. Instead, we ran generalized linearmodels with a logit link, binomial family, androbust standard errors, as Papke andWooldridge (1996) recommended, usingStata v. 9 (Stata FAQ n.d.). This techniqueadjusts for the nonnormally distributed resid-uals and ensures that predicted values fallwithin the logical range (0–1).

RESULTS

Table 2 reports race-specific means and stan-dard deviations for all the independent vari-ables. It shows that more females than maleswere represented in all racial groups and

made up three-fourths of the sample of blackstudents. This finding is in line with the factthat more females than males enroll in col-lege in the United States. In 2002, womenconstituted 55.5 percent of all students infour-year colleges (Buchmann and DiPrete2006). On average, all the groups came fromhigh-SES backgrounds, but note that the veryhigh income levels of those at the top inflatethe means. Approximately 26 percent of thesample reported annual family incomes high-er than $200,000, with 37 percent of thewhite students, 11 percent of the black stu-dents, 26 percent of the Latino students, 17percent of the Asian students, and 23 percentof the other-race students doing so. Therewere relatively few students from the lowerranges of the income distribution; only 20percent of the sample reported annual familyincomes of $50,000 or less. A larger propor-tion of the black students (37 percent) than ofthe Latino (22 percent), Asian (22 percent),and other race students (17 percent) were inthis lower-income bracket. Only 11 percent ofthe white students reported family incomes ofless than $50,000. The median-income cate-gory was the same for all racial groups exceptblacks. Parental education levels were alsohigh, with all groups reporting parental edu-cation means of more than 17 years ofschooling. These figures underscore the pre-dominance of advantaged students in highlyselective private universities generally (Karen2002). We discuss the implications of thehigh-SES backgrounds of this sample for ourfindings in greater detail later.

In terms of precollege experiences, thewhite students reported far fewer interracialfriendships in their precollege friendship net-works than did any other group. They alsolived in neighborhoods and attended highschools with the highest concentration ofwhites. There were interesting racial differ-ences in college experiences as well. Thewhite students were least likely to report crossracial/ethnic friendships in their residencehalls, and the black students were most likelyto report interracial tension in these settings.Even in the context of the random assign-ment of roommates, only 21 percent of thewhites had roommates of a different race,owing to the fact that whites were the major-


ity (69 percent) of undergraduates at the uni-versity. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and otherracial groups made up 10 percent, 6 percent,11 percent, and 4 percent of the student pop-ulation, respectively. Whites and Latinos weremore likely than other racial groups to joinfraternities and sororities during their first

year of college. Forty-two percent of thewhites and 44 percent of the Latinos joined afraternity or sorority, but only 12 percent ofthe Asians and a very small number of blacks(N = 9) joined (traditionally white) fraternitiesor sororities in their first year. Racial variationsin Greek membership may change in later

Table 2: Race-Specific Means and Standard Deviations for Independent Variables

White Black Latino Asian OtherName (N = 347) (N = 138) (N = 127) (N = 138) (N = 50)

Independent VariablesFemale .522 .754 .543 .529 .640

(.500) (.432) (.500) (.501) (.485)Socioeconomic Status

Parent’s education 19.134 17.234 18.312 18.522 18.061(in years) (2.875) (3.530) (3.239) (3.105) (2.696)

Income $216,006 $109,905 $165,720 $146,977 $162,813(159,749) (111,037) (143,969) (126,771) (139,849)

Median income $125,000 $67,500 $125,000 $125,000 $125,000

Racial Composition ofHigh school neighborhood 1.468 2.684 1.936 2.394 2.020

(.690) (1.445) (1.134) (1.297) (1.000)

High school 2.026 2.566 2.357 2.745 2.286(.810) (1.114) (.992) (1.163) (.957)

Precollege friendship network .109 .399 .764 .529 .872(.181) (.347) (.301) (.341) (.203)

College ContactsDifferent-race roommate .213 .616 .803 .681 .820

(.410) (.488) (.399) (.468) (.388)No roommate .121 .094 .134 .130 .140

(.327) (.293) (.342) (.338) (.351)Cross racial/ethnic 3.867 4.036 3.937 4.073 4.000

friendships (.984) (.977) (1.029) (.944) (.866)Intraracial conflict in 2.114 2.181 2.008 1.898 1.918

residence hall (.989) (.976) (.930) (.893) (.932)Interracial tension in 1.918 1.964 1.964 1.750 1.816

residence hall (.772) (.955) (.776) (.786) (.858)Classroom composition 23.743 75.342 74.219 65.506 73.286

(12.795) (13.153) (12.934) (13.274) (12.845)Other club .646 .790 .614 .833 .740

(.479) (.409) (.489) (.374) (.443)Fraternity/sorority .424 .065 .441 .123 .280

(.495) (.248) (.498) (.330) (.454)Cultural/ethnic club .035 .630 .339 .515 .320

(.183) (.484) (.475) (.502) (.471)


years, since traditionally black fraternitiesdelay their rush process until the second yearat this university. Less than 4 percent of thewhite students joined cultural and ethnicorganizations, while more than half the blackand Asian students and one-third of theLatino students did.

Table 3 shows the changes in the racialcomposition of friendship networks in thetransition from high school to college foreach racial group. The results indicate partialsupport for Hypothesis 1, in that friendshipsare homophilous with respect to race, butonly for whites and blacks. In fact, Latinos,Asians, and those who self-identify as otherrace all have a majority of different-racefriends both before college and during thefirst year.

The results in Table 3 support Hypothesis2, in that students from every other

racial/ethnic group have significantly moreinterracial friendships than do white studentsbefore college and during their first year ofcollege. These results underline the extremelyhigh levels of racial homophily within thewhite population found in other studies (e.g.,Joyner and Kao 2000; Massey et al. 2003;Quillian and Campbell 2003). Before college,whites’ friendship networks are an average of10.9 percent nonwhite. During the first yearof college, whites form more interracialfriendships, such that their networks are anaverage of 16.2 percent nonwhite by thespring semester. Blacks have a significantlyhigher proportion of interracial friendshipsthan do whites before college, but they arethe only group for whom the proportion ofinterracial friendships declines significantly;the mean proportion of nonblack friends intheir networks decreases from 39.9 percent to

Table 3. Means and Standard Deviations of Precollege and First-Year College Proportionof Different-Race Friends

Precollege First-Year Change inProportion of Proportion of Different-Race FriendsDifferent-Race Different-Race

Group (N) Friends Friends

White (347)Mean .109 .162 .052+a

SE .181 .187 .190

Black (138)Mean .399*b .311* -.086*+SE .347 .315 .268

Latino (127)Mean .764* .803* .039SE .301 .247 .260

Asian (138)Mean .529* .521* -.008SE .341 .325 .316

Other (50)Mean .872* .924* .052SE .203 .130 .215

a + denotes that the measure differs from Time 1 to Time 2 within racial group at the p <.05 level.

b * denotes that the measure differs from whites at the p < .05 level.


31.1 percent in the first year of college.Latino, Asian, and other-race students have asignificantly higher proportion of interracialfriendships than do whites before college,and this pattern persists in the first year of col-lege, when different-race friends constitute80.3 percent, 52.1 percent, and 92.4 percentof their networks, respectively.

Table 4 reports the results of regressionanalyses of the determinants of the propor-tion of interracial friendships in the first yearof college. The sample size declined some-what from that reported in the previoustables because of missing data, but a com-parison of the samples used in Tables 3 and 4indicated that the missing data did not biasthe results. Model 1 in Table 4 includesrespondents’ race, gender, and SES as inde-pendent variables, as well as measures of pre-college interracial friendships and opportuni-ties for interracial contact. The results parallelthose found in Table 2; net of gender andSES, Latino, Asian, and other-race studentshave significantly higher proportions of inter-racial friendships than do white students (theexcluded category). There is no significantdifference between white and black students,however, with the other measures included.Furthermore, we found support forHypothesis 3, which predicts that studentswho have higher proportions of interracialfriendships prior to college also have propor-tionately more interracial friendships duringtheir first year of college. These results under-line the continuing influence of friendship-formation patterns that are established dur-ing high school. To ensure that we were notsimply measuring the extent to which stu-dents retained high school friends in theirearly college networks, we included a controlvariable for the proportion of on-campusfriends in students’ networks in other analy-ses. The inclusion of this variable did notchange the substantive results and accordswith the fact that friends on campus consti-tute the majority of friends in most students’networks.

In addition to students’ prior experiences,aspects of the college context shape theprobability of forming friendships with stu-dents of other races. To test hypotheses thatwere derived from contact theory that high-

light the role of propinquity in influencingfriendship formation, Model 2 adds variablesfor the respondents’ reports about theirroommates, the quality of race relations intheir residence halls, the racial composition oftheir college classrooms, and their member-ship in some types of extracurricular activities.Model 3 tests the effects of all independentvariables simultaneously. Except for the effectof one variable, the results are consistentacross Models 2 and 3.7

On the whole, Table 4 shows the influ-ences of both contexts of choice and contextsof placement. For contexts of placement, asHypothesis 4 predicts, students with a room-mate of a different race have significantlyhigher proportions of interracial friendshipsthan do those who have a same-race room-mate. Students who have no roommate alsohave proportionately more interracial friend-ships than do students with a same-raceroommate. We discuss this point in moredetail later. We also tested whether the pro-portion of interracial friendships of studentswith no roommate differed significantly fromthat of students with a different-race room-mate and found that it did not. In line withHypothesis 5, students who report frequentcross-racial/ethnic friendships in their resi-dence hall have a higher proportion of inter-racial friendships than do those who do notreport such relationships.

In contrast to the results concerning resi-dential propinquity for Hypotheses 4 and 5,we found no support for the effects of propin-quity in the classroom on the formation offriendships: Students in more racially hetero-geneous classrooms do not have significantlyhigher proportions of interracial friendships.Thus, Hypothesis 6 is not supported. Again,contact theory would highlight the relativelybrief nature of the contact in the classroom;the possible lack of explicit support for inter-racial contact from authority figures; and thefact that students in the classroom are fre-quently competing for grades, rather thancooperating, to explain the findings withrespect to classroom composition.

Although we found a consistent influenceof some contexts of placement, namely, resi-dential propinquity, on interracial friendshipformation, some types of contexts of choice


have little influence. Specifically, Model 2shows that Hypothesis 7 is not substantiated,since students who join clubs that are notGreek or ethnic/cultural in nature are not sig-nificantly different from other students interms of the racial composition of their friend-ship networks. Thus, propinquity in some

types of extracurricular activities appears tohave little effect on the formation of interra-cial friendships.

The measure used to test Hypothesis 7 hasseveral weaknesses, however. First, the orga-nizations included are varied, comprising anyextracurricular activities that are not Greek or

Table 4. Generalized Linear Model (GLM) Regressions of First-Year Proportion ofDifferent-Race Friends

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Independent Variables Beta SE Beta SE Beta SE

Female -.026 .110 -.032 .116 -.048 .106Race

Black -.001 .174 1.010** .325 .018 .315Latino 1.654*** .189 3.090*** .314 1.541*** .324Asian .734*** .165 1.831*** .271 .717** .272Other 2.544*** .327 4.252*** .412 2.396*** .434

SESParent's education -.007 .018 -.012 .019Log income -.022 .056 -.005 .055

Precollege Neighborhood racial

composition -.025 .058 -.022 .057High school racial

composition -.042 .058 -.047 .060Interracial friendships 2.591*** .203 2.519*** .197

College ContactsResidence Hall

Different-race roommate .674*** .140 .646*** .133No roommate .445* .203 .312 .188Cross-racial friendships .202** .063 .212*** .060Intraracial conflict -.085 .064 -.047 .058Interracial tension .122 .081 .089 .074

ClassroomClassroom composition -.003 .005 -.001 .005

Extracurricular ActivitiesOther club .101 .136 .044 .130Fraternity/sorority .167 .131 .136 .113Cultural/ethnic club -.578*** .147 -.332* .134

Constant -1.500* .657 -2.783*** .393 -2.738*** .753N = 666

* p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001. Note: Results were obtained using the GLM function in Stata, version 9, with a logit link andthe binomial family and robust standard errors.


ethnic/cultural in nature. While the measureincludes such activities as sports, student gov-ernment, and the student newspaper, whichreasonably constitute collaborative experi-ences, it also contains many other types ofactivities, as indicated by the fact that 70 per-cent of all students participate in such organi-zations (see Table 1). Given the broad mea-sure that we used, it is probable that some ofthe activities are racially homogeneous andothers are racially heterogeneous, thus result-ing in no net effect for this measure. It is alsopossible that these types of extracurricularexperiences at the college level do not con-tain the same features of those in high schooland are less collaborative in nature than arethose that have been found to be associatedwith interracial friendships among highschool students (e.g., Moody 2001). We alsoexamined whether there were race-specificeffects of participation in these other types ofextracurricular activities, but found none(results not shown).

In addition to the variables measuring theeffects of residential and classroom propin-quity, Model 2 also includes some variablesthat were designed to measure the role of theconfluence of homophily and propinquity onfriendship formation and further investigatesthe influence of contexts of choice. Model 2shows that students who join cultural/ethnicclubs have significantly fewer interracialfriendships in their first year of college thando students who do not join these clubs.There is no significant main effect of mem-bership in Greek organizations.

Finally, in Table 5, we test whether member-ship in Greek organizations and cultural/ethnicclubs has racially specific effects.8 Recall thatHypotheses 8 and 9 predict different outcomeson the basis of the race of the students and theracial composition of the organization that thestudents joined to assess the intersectionbetween homophily and propinquity. Model 1reports race-specific effects of fraternity mem-bership for whites. White students who join fra-ternities and sororities report a significantlylower proportion of interracial friendships thando other white students. White students whojoin fraternities and sororities experience no sig-nificant increase in the proportion of their inter-racial friendships, while those who do not “go

Greek” significantly increase their proportion ofinterracial friendships over the first year of col-lege. The results support Hypothesis 8b, in thatwhite Greek members have proportionatelyfewer interracial friendships than do whiteswho do not join fraternities or sororities in theirfirst year of college. These findings are consis-tent with the notion that homophily andpropinquity can intersect in important ways.Because some white students are attracted toprimarily white Greek organizations, theirfriendship networks do not gain the sameamount of racial and ethnic diversity as do thenetworks of white students who do not jointhese organizations. Thus, propinquity—ortime spent in a primarily white organization—reinforces the initial difference in homophily-seeking behavior.

In contrast, propinquity to different-raceothers in primarily white Greek organizationsis associated with higher proportions of inter-racial friendships for Latinos, blacks, andAsians who join fraternities and sororities. Thenumber of blacks and Asians who join Greekorganizations is small, so caution is warrantedin interpreting these results. Nonetheless,black students who join fraternities and soror-ities do not lose interracial friendships duringthe first year of college, as do black studentswho do not join primarily white Greek orga-nizations. The process for Asians is similar,with those who join Greek organizationskeeping their proportions of interracial friend-ships relatively stable. In addition, Latinoswho join fraternities and sororities gain pro-portionately more interracial friendships intheir first year of college, while the racial com-position of Latino non-Greek members’friendship networks does not change signifi-cantly. Supporting Hypothesis 9b is the factthat ethnic minorities who join Greek organi-zations have proportionately more interracialfriendships than do ethnic minorities who donot join fraternities and sororities.

In contrast to the results for Greek mem-bership, membership in a cultural/ethnicgroup does not appear to affect students ofdifferent racial groups differently (results notshown). Thus, we found no support forHypotheses 8a and 9a, which predict thatsuch membership would reduce the propor-tion of interracial friendships for blacks,


Asians, and Latinos and increase the propor-tion of interracial friendships for whites. Whilewe did not find racially specific effects, thesignificant main effect of membership in acultural/ethnic organization in Table 4 indi-cates that such membership is associatedwith friendship networks that contain propor-tionately fewer interracial friendships.Because less than 4 percent of white studentsreport membership in a cultural/ethnic orga-nization, our results suggest that the mem-bership in these organizations is associatedwith proportionately fewer interracial friend-ships for students of color, but not for anyethnic minority group in particular. In addi-tion, although we cannot know definitivelywhich organizations students join, descriptiveresults (not shown) suggest that they joinethnic/cultural clubs that are congruent withtheir own racial identity. For instance, blackswho join ethnic/cultural clubs have a signifi-

cantly higher percentage of blacks in theirfriendship networks than do blacks who donot join ethnic/cultural clubs, even thoughthey begin college with networks that do notdiffer significantly in their racial composition.

We must be cautious in making causalarguments about fraternity and club mem-bership, since students are choosing to jointhese organizations. It is reasonable to expectthat students’ proclivity toward environmentsthat are racially homogeneous or heteroge-neous may influence their choices of extracur-ricular activities. This point does not diminishthe importance of the lower proportions ofinterracial friendships for whites who join fra-ternities and sororities, since it underscoresthat “birds of a feather do tend to flocktogether.” These results, moreover, serve asan important contrast to the findings for resi-dence halls. When participation is voluntaryand determined by choice, many students

Table 5. Generalized Linear Model (GLM) Regressions of First-Year Proportion ofDifferent-Race Friends: Interactions Between Race and Greek Membership

Model 1 Model 2

Independent Variables Beta SE Beta SE

RaceBlack — — -.156 .318Latino 1.408*** .187 1.121** .333Asian .701*** .174 .579* .278Other 2.311*** .340 2.472*** .420White .190 .316 — —

Extracurricular ActivitiesFraternity/Sorority .620*** .161 -.377* .166

Asian*Fraternity/Sorority — — .631* .309Black*Fraternity/Sorority — — 1.079** .403Latino*Fraternity/Sorority — — 1.418*** .305White*Fraternity/Sorority -.989*** .237 — —

Constant -2.883** .875 -2.622** .760N = 666

* p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001. Note: Results were obtained using the GLM function in Stata, version 9, with a logit link

and the binomial family and robust standard errors. Models also include the variables in Model3 from Table 4: gender, parental education and income, proportion of precollege different-race friends, racial composition of the high school and precollege neighborhood, racial com-position of the college classrooms, roommate's race, and measures of race relations in the res-idence halls.


tend to chose homophilous contexts andfriendships; when organizational policies arein place to ensure that students have interra-cial contact in at least one major facet of thecollege experience, such as residence halls,their friendship networks contain a higherproportion of interracial friendships.

CONCLUSIONS

In the transition from high school to college,both the degree and direction of change inthe racial composition of friendship networksvary by race/ethnicity. Whites have the fewestinterracial friendships of all groups prior toentering college; they experience an increas-ing proportion of interracial friendships intheir networks in the transition to college, butthe proportion of interracial friendships inwhites’ friendship networks in the first year ofcollege remains lower than that of students ofother racial groups. The proportion of interra-cial friendships for Asians, Latinos, and otherschanges only marginally, and the proportionof interracial friendships in blacks’ networksdecreases.

Why do blacks experience a significantdecline in the proportion of interracial friend-ships during their first year of college? Twomechanisms may be at work. The first mech-anism may be the “cocooning” behavior(Tatum 1987) that some black students pur-sue to acclimate themselves to a predomi-nantly white campus. Tatum (1987:84)described this behavior in secondary schoolsand predominantly white neighborhoods asblack families and students purposely seekingout other black families and students to form“supportive alliances.” The black students inour sample came from largely middle-classbackgrounds and many, although by nomeans all, attended fairly integrated highschools. For these students, college may rep-resent the first opportunity that they had todevelop a significant number of same-racefriendships and to increase the size of theirsame-race networks. If, as Gurin (1999) andEaton (2001) found, black students benefitacademically or socially from same-race tiesto a greater extent than they do from interra-cial friendships, the decline in interracial

friendships for blacks may not be a cause forconcern. These results are also consistent withthose of Quillian and Campbell (2003), whofound that when race is a salient characteris-tic and a group is outnumbered in a givensocial setting, same-race ties and same-racesolidarity increase.

The second mechanism that may be dri-ving the results for blacks is not mutuallyexclusive from the first and does presentsome cause for concern. Discrimination bystudents from other racial and ethnic groups,who may resist forming friendships withblacks more than with Latinos, Asians, andwhites, may increase the probability thatblacks form same-race friendships. Whileplausible, these conjectures are not testablewith the available data.

The findings also shed light on the influ-ences of homophily, propinquity, and theirintersecting effects on the racial compositionof friendship networks. With respect tohomophily before college, interracial friend-ships during the high school years improveone’s proclivity to form interracial friendshiplater in life. Our results indicate that the pro-portion of interracial friendships in students’friendship networks prior to college had thelargest impact on the proportion of interracialfriendships in the first year of college. Notethat we cannot determine the exact source ofthe relationship between the racial composi-tion of students’ friendship networks and thatin college-level friendships. Some studentsmay simply have a greater proclivity to formcross-race friendships in both high school andcollege, or prior experience with interracialfriendships may make students more com-fortable with seeking such friendships there-after. At any rate, the finding is noteworthy inthat it indicates that prior experiences withinterracial contact are related to such experi-ences later in life. While many changes occurin the transition to college, some habits offriendship formation remain.

In addition, we highlight the impact ofpropinquity on friendship choices, usinghypotheses derived from contact theory. Thisstudy is the first to extend contact theory tothe study of interracial friendship formation incollege by assessing the degree to whichexperiences in various college contexts,


including residence halls and classrooms, arerelated to the racial composition of students’friendship networks. Contact theory predictsthat positive intergroup relations are morelikely to form under conditions that fosterequal status interactions with explicit supportfor intergroup mixing from recognizedauthority figures and when groups work col-laboratively toward a goal. We maintainedthat the intimate, informal nature of interac-tions in residence halls puts roommates andhallmates on an equal footing in terms of sta-tus and thus constitutes a context that, fol-lowing contact theory, should be especiallyconducive to the formation of interracialfriendship ties. Moreover, when policiesensure that roommates are matched random-ly with respect to race, as is the case at theuniversity we studied, support for intergroupmixing from recognized authority figures ismade explicit.

The findings accord well with our expecta-tions: Students who have a different- raceroommate have a higher proportion of inter-racial friendships than do those with a same-race roommate. Even if the students do notbecome friends with their roommates, it ispossible that a roommate will serve as abridge to other friendship networks. In otherresearch, Marmaros and Sacerdote (2006)did not find this to be the case for whites withblack roommates, but their findings were lim-ited to this particular subset of interracial con-tact. Also, students who report frequentcross-racial/ethnic friendships in their resi-dence hall have more interracial friendshipsthan do those who do not report such rela-tionships.

The finding that students without room-mates have more interracial friendships thando those with same-race roommates wasunexpected but makes sense upon reflection.Students with same-race roommates have alike other with whom to interact on a consis-tent basis, while those without roommatesmust seek friendships more proactively. Indoing so, in the context of racially diverse res-idence halls, they may come into contactwith students of different races more fre-quently than may students who have a room-mate of the same race on whom to fall backfor friendship.

College students spend a great deal oftheir time in their residence halls; their geo-graphic propinquity to other students in theirrooms and residence halls is greater than it isin elementary and secondary schools andprobably greater than it will be at any otherpoint in their lives. This finding underscoresthe importance of geographic propinquity forfriendship choices (Festinger, Schachter, andBack 1950; Marmaros and Sacerdote 2006).It also suggests an important policy lever thatcollege administrators can use to promotepositive interracial interactions and friend-ships among college students. By minimizingthe role of students’ preferences in policies onthe assignment of roommates and residencehalls, colleges and universities with raciallydiverse student populations can create livingenvironments that are conducive to the for-mation of interracial friendships. These con-cerns should be tempered, however, by con-sideration of the effects that such policiescould have for racial/ethnic minority stu-dents’ ability to form friendship networkswith like others, which prior research hasshown to be beneficial for their academic andsocial outcomes (e.g., Gurin 1999).

In contrast to residence halls, classroomsdo not, on average, have a discernible impacton the formation of interracial friendships incollege. These results contrast with researchthat has found that the ethnic composition ofclassrooms influences friendship choices inearly and middle childhood (Hallinan andWilliams 1987; Kubitschek and Hallinan1998). These different results may be due tothe fact that college students spend consider-ably less time in any particular classroom thando younger students, and the larger lecture-style classes that are typical in college mayprovide more limited opportunities for stu-dents’ interaction. For these reasons, theymay fall short of fulfilling the conditions thatcontact theory deems to be the most con-ducive to positive intergroup relations.

In addition, extracurricular activities that donot have an explicitly racial or ethnic characterappear to be less related to the formation ofinterracial friendships than do residential halls.Although we would have liked to distinguishorganizations with characteristics that met theconditions of contact theory from those that


did not, unfortunately our data did not allow usto do so. It is likely that this measure ofextracurricular activities includes both raciallyhomogeneous and racially heterogeneousorganizations, undermining our ability to dis-cern whether membership in these types oforganizations matters. Thus, the analysis pro-vides a weak test of Hypothesis 7, which wasderived from contact theory.

This study also contributes a considerationof the intersecting and/or overlapping effects ofhomophily and propinquity on friendship for-mation. Given that many of the extracurricularorganizations on campus are relatively homo-geneous with respect to race, many of the stu-dents at this university can choose to partici-pate in extracurricular activities surrounded byracially similar (or different) others. Some ofthese extracurricular activities, namely, Greekorganizations and cultural/ethnic groups, arerelated to significantly different proportions ofinterracial friendship ties for members of someracial groups. For instance, although they begincollege with similar proportions of interracialfriends, white students who do not join Greekorganizations gain proportionately more inter-racial friendships, but relative numbers of inter-racial friendships are stable for white Greekmembers. Furthermore, Latino, black, andAsian students who join fraternities or sororitiesin their first year report proportionately moreinterracial friendships than do Latino, black,and Asian students who do not join these orga-nizations. Since they have joined traditionallywhite organizations, we can presume thatthese students spend time in theirfraternities/sororities interacting primarily withstudents from other racial backgrounds anddeveloping friendships with them.

In addition, students who join ethnic/cul-tural clubs have lower proportions of interra-cial friendships than do students who do notjoin these clubs. Unlike the analyses of Greekorganizations, we cannot infer which ethnicor cultural clubs the students are joining. Onthe basis of our results, we speculate that theclubs they are joining are populated primarilyby same-race others, such that black studentswho are members of an ethnic or culturalclub are more likely to join the Black StudentAlliance than the Chinese Dance Association,but we cannot demonstrate this point defini-

tively. Thus, we see that for some students,the effects of homophily—or attraction toorganizations that are populated primarily bysame-race others—is compounded by theeffects of propinquity in that their organiza-tional membership is associated with propor-tionately fewer interracial friendships.

There are a few relevant data limitationsfor our findings. The students in this studywere not a nationally representative sampleof college students in the United States. Infact, they were different in some importantways. Upon entering the university, these stu-dents underwent a major upheaval in theirresidential, social, and academic lives. All first-year students live on campus, and many ofthem enter college knowing no other stu-dents. In this respect, one can think of thesestudents undergoing a complete “shuffling ofthe deck” in their social relationships.9 Thisprocess is less likely to occur when studentslive at home or enter universities closer tohome where it may be easier to maintainfriendships with their high school peers. Thehigh average SES of the students in the sam-ple also underscores that the students in thisstudy were similar to students at other eliteprivate universities in the United States (seethe Appendix for details). Thus, we believethat the results found here should be applica-ble to selective colleges and universities thatdraw their students from a national popula-tion. Future research should examine whetherinstitutional factors are as strongly related tothe formation of interracial friendships atother types of colleges and universities.Whether students’ friendship networks willbecome more or less diverse during theirremaining college years is another questionworthy of future research.

As desegregation efforts in elementary andsecondary schools decline, college may pro-vide the first opportunity for many youngadults to interact closely in academic, resi-dential, or social settings with members ofdifferent racial and ethnic groups. The ethnicdiversity of students’ friendship networks incollege has the potential to affect individuals’comfort level within ethnically diverse work-places, educational institutions, and neigh-borhoods later in life (Bowen and Bok 1998;Dawkins and Braddock 1994; Wells and Crain


1994). In addition, colleges are institutionsthat are designed to produce skilled gradu-ates with the capacity to lead a diversedemocracy; to promote these goals, a level ofinformal interaction, including friendship,among members of various racial/ethnicgroups is necessary. Thus, the degree andquality of interracial contact in college mayhave important repercussions for the atti-tudes and social interactions of members ofall racial and ethnic groups well beyond thecollege experience and throughout the lifecourse (Bowen and Bok 1998).

Our results highlight the fact that theprocess of interracial friendship formation is notstraightforward, in that prior experiences, col-lege-era experiences, and racially homophiloustendencies all influence the extent to which stu-dents form interracial friendships during theirfirst year of college. Nevertheless, there are pol-icy levers, especially those related to the assign-ment of roommates and race relations in resi-dence halls, that administrators can use toencourage the formation of interracial friend-ships. As Gurin et al. (2002:362) pointed out,“educators must intentionally structure oppor-tunities for students to leave the comfort oftheir homogeneous peer group and build rela-tionships across racially/ethnically diverse stu-dent communities on campus.” Our findingssuggest that interracial friendships will beformed only rarely without such interventions.

NOTES

1. Race was measured via the respondents’self-reported ethnic status on the admissionapplication form. We use the term black, ratherthan African American, because there weresome black non-Americans, such as studentsfrom the Caribbean, in the sample. Of the 138blacks in the sample, 24 were not Americans.To place respondents in racioethnic categories,the survey used census-type questions thatmeasured first whether or not the respondentwas Hispanic and then elicited a racial catego-ry. Virtually all “Hispanic” respondents reportedtheir race as “white,” so we classified this groupas Latino. Other groups were categorized onthe basis of the race question, which includebiracial and multiracial options.

2. Spenner, Buchmann, and Landerman(2005) provided details about nonresponsebias and patterns of missing data for the CLLsample and concluded that the effects aresmall.

3. Because students could list only a limit-ed number of friends, those with largerfriendship networks could not list all theirfriends (Hallinan 1974). They probably listedtheir closest friends and left out those withwhom they were merely friendly. This is not aserious limitation here because we are inter-ested in strong ties.

4. Friendship networks during the secondsemester in college included high schoolfriends and college friends. For those whoprovided information about how they hadmet their friends, “on-campus” friends madeup more than half of most respondents’ net-works. Given concerns about relatively smallsample sizes, we did not restrict the analysisto on-campus friends but note that the resultswere robust to the addition of control vari-ables, in separate models, for the number offriends attending the same university andproportion of friends attending the same uni-versity. In addition, the results from modelsthat were run with an alternative dependentvariable—a logistic measure of whether thestudent had made an interracial friend whileat the university—were consistent with thosereported here. It is interesting that no whitestudents reported that all their friends werenonwhite, but a number of blacks (5), Latinos(37), and Asians (15) had homogeneous all-white networks, and some Asians and Latinos(5) had homogeneous networks made up ofnonwhites of a race different from their own.

5. We also conducted the analyses usingthe first five friends listed, rather than theeight friends. The results were substantivelysimilar to those reported here.

6. The students were given the choice of 11income categories in reporting their parents’earnings during their last year of high school.We took the midpoint of these categories incomputing the mean and median incomes andlogged the midpoint in the regression analyses.The categories were as follows: (1) less than$1,000, (2) $1,000–$9,999, (3) $10,000–$19,999, (4) $20,000–$29,999, (5) $30,000–$49,999, (6) $50,000–$74,999, (7) $75,000–


$99,999, (8) $100,000–$149,999, (9)$150,000–$199,999, (10) $200,000–$499,999, and (11) $500,000 or higher.

7. The coefficient for no roommate is sig-nificant at the p < .05 level in Model 2, butonly at the p < .10 level in Model 3.

8. The coefficients in Table 5 reflect the

results net of the other variables from Table 4,including gender, SES, precollege measures,residence hall measures, and classroom com-position measures. The full results are avail-able from the first author on request.

9. Thanks to Bill Carbonaro for suggestingthis image.

APPENDIXTable A1. Comparison of the Study University with Other Elite Colleges and

Universities

Study School Elite Top 50

Freshmen retention rate 97 97.22 90Year 2000 graduation rate 93 93 79.86% classes < 20 69 65.11 53.33% classes > 50 7 12.11 11.98Student-faculty ratio 9.0:1 8.22:1 10.69:1SAT 25% 1300 1334 1234SAT 75% 1500 1522 1424Freshmen top 10% of high school class 86 88.89 73.14Acceptance rate 26 17.33 38.33

Source: U.S. News and World Report (http://usnews.com).Note: Elite schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Stanford,

and Columbia.

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Elizabeth Stearns, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of NorthCarolina at Charlotte. Her main fields of interest are interracial friendships, racial and gender dif-ferences in students’ achievement and attainment, and participation in extracurricular activities.Her current work focuses on how high school characteristics, including racial composition, influencelater educational, occupational, and civic outcomes for students.

Claudia Buchmann, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, The Ohio StateUniversity. Her main fields of interest are social stratification, gender, race, and higher education.Her current work focuses on gender inequalities in education.

Kara Bonneau, MA, is the Associate Director of the North Carolina Education Research Data Center(NCERDC), Durham, North Carolina. Her main fields of interest are education, stratification,race/ethnicity, social psychology, and educational policy. Ms. Bonneau is currently involved in thecreation and oversight of the NCERDC database for educational research, including a new projectthat will link data on North Carolina public schools to community college records.

An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American SociologicalAssociation in 2004. Many thanks to Linda Renzulli for her helpful comments on this manuscriptand to Michelle Paul for her assistance with analysis. Direct all correspondence to Elizabeth Stearns,Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard,Charlotte, NC 28223; e-mail: [email protected].

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