The federal government requires colleges and universities to report their race, ethnicity, and gender demographics as a set of fixed categories. These distinctions make a variety of assumptions about race and gender: “white” refers to people of European, Middle Eastern, and North African descent; gender encompasses only “male” or “female.”
Connecticut College uses federally-recommended categories for its official datasets that are published online and are used internally by the Office of Institutional Research and the Office of the Registrar. These distinctions define the College’s demographics, and mean that the college only officially knows the identities of its students, faculty, and staff based on these federally-determined categories. The College is unable to identify cases where race or gender identity may deviate from or contradict official categorizations.
Director of Institutional Research John Nugent says the College’s demographic alignment with federal categories can complicate efforts to accurately identify certain groups. For example, Nugent says the count of “U.S. Students of Color” — a designation listed on the College’s demographics site — is an aggregate of those who identify with the non-white federal categories, rather than a self-reportable identity. According to the College’s demographics report, this includes “American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Two or more races.” But the categorization of “Students of Color” does not include those who are officially categorized as white but might identify as persons of color or simply non-white.
The definition of “white” used in the 2010 census, as well as that used by the Department of Education, is “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” But a 2017 U.S. Census Bureau report found that “it is optimal to use a dedicated Middle Eastern response category.” Part of the study found that “when no MENA category was available, people who identified as MENA predominantly reported in the White category, but when a MENA category was included, people who identified as MENA predominantly reported in the MENA category.”
Nugent says the automatic categorization of people of Middle Eastern or North African descent as white can create “a vacuum of our understanding” at the College. He says in cases when his office might get a request such as, “can we have a list of students of color so we can email them when there’s programming,” there isn’t official data on who makes up students of color outside of the combination of those who identified with federally-suggested non-white categories.
Issues of gender raise similar concerns. Nugent says that on the matter of sex, “the federal government is unyielding. You are male or female. There’s no third category.” Colleges must report 100% of their student body as male or female. An IPEDS frequently-asked-questions page says that institutions may decide how they report students who do not self-select a gender, but suggests a common method: to allocate students with gender unknown based on the known proportion of men to women. The College’s demographics reporting does not recognize non-binary gender identities, meaning that from a data standpoint, the College has limited ability to reach out to such students.
There is little indication that official means of surveying race and gender will adapt to fit changing definitions. Nugent says that while internal institutional knowledge is important, much data collection serves the purpose of complying with federal demographics data requirements.
He notes that there have been efforts to get more information through questionnaires, like a college-wide housing survey, but that these attempts are not entirely reliable. “If you want to be reporting things, like how many self-identifying Arab students do we have, or how many self-identifying LGBTQ students do we have, if you have a 30% response rate, and the numbers are pretty small. Chances are you’re just going to miss a bunch of people.” He says that incomplete or wrong data “is almost worse than not having it.”
There appears to be similar stagnation at the federal level. The census bureau announced in January that it will not follow recommendations for a MENA category and will wait for more research. National Public Radio reported that many advocates of a MENA category are frustrated that 2030 would be earliest possible census with such a category.
Those who identify with categories not officially designated by the College may still find significant support on campus through offices and student groups like Institutional Equity and Inclusion, the LGBTQ center, Unity House, and more. But at an institutional level, the College’s use of federal race and gender categories for demographics reports may limit its ability to better understand its community.
