Toward Ameliorating Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education: Elevating Student Voices and Critiquing Multiracially-Exclusive Policy & Practice

Abstract

Focus on multiracially-identified college students has continued to gain momentum in contemporary educational research, along with public and academic awareness of this burgeoning population—which has given needed voice to the unique and nuanced experiences and needs central to multiracial students’ lives. However, most recent scholarship has begun to more critically examine higher education institutions’ continued exclusion of multiracial students in various areas of policy and practice—much of which includes (but is not necessarily limited to) examination of student affairs organizations designed to support college students who hold minoritized racial/ethnic identities. Centering interviews with multiracial graduate and undergraduate students at Eastern University, Central Coast University, and Southwestern University and drawing from two critical multiracial frameworks (in particular, MultiCrit and the Contextualizing Multiraciality in Campus Climate Model (CMCC)), this study sought to not only examine and highlight multiracial exclusion in student affairs education, but also extend beyond that to include facets of higher education not widely encompassed in extant scholarship: curriculum and mentorship. Additional and equally important aims of this study included a comparative investigation of institutional policies and practices which contribute to the erasure of multiracial student identity (across the three different institutions), as well as exploration of emergent similarities in peer interactions and identity processes shared across multiracial college students’ experiences.