Are University Communities Deeply Divided over the Value of Diversity on Campus? Understanding Students’ Preferences via Conjoint Analysis

The issue of diversity on university campuses is now highly politicized in the United States. This paper advances our understanding of student attitudes toward this contentious issue using fully randomized conjoint analysis, a method recently developed to measure multidimensional preferences underlying choices. Based on campus-wide surveys of undergraduate students at Dartmouth College, one of the universities frequently in the news on diversity-related protests and conflicts, we show broad support for prioritizing diversity in faculty recruitment and undergraduate admissions. The estimated preferences for diversity vary across groups but, contrary to what some media coverage suggests, we find no evidence of polarization in opinions among students with regard to their preferences to increase faculty members and students with traditionally underrepresented attributes