Voluntary questionnaire placed online to increase user response
Starting Jan. 19, UNM students, faculty and staff will be prompted to provide their race and ethnicity.
The race and ethnicity data collection is a requirement for educational institutions that receive government support, Linda Johansen of UNM’s ITS Department said.
“It’s not really a choice — the U.S. Department of Education mandated this change, and any school that wants to keep its federal funding has to comply,” she said.
“The University’s eligibility for various kinds of federally funded grants and contracts and student financial aid depends on compliance with this mandate.”
The survey has been converted from a mailed document to an online format and now allows participants to select multiple races, said Josephine De Leon, vice president of Equity and Inclusion and executive sponsor of the project.
“I believe that the new format is able to capture some multiracial identities more effectively. A problem may exist for some individuals like my granddaughter who is Hispanic, Italian, African-American and American Indian,” she said. “Any categorization will not fully capture the rich racial and ethnic background that she embodies. I suspect that the same may be true for many students and employees on this campus.”
The first question determines a user’s ethnicity by asking if they are Hispanic, since “Hispanic” is the only federally recognized ethnicity. The second question, determining race, allows users to check as many boxes as they deem applicable.
The survey is not mandatory.
Race and ethnicity information is important to obtain because it serves as recruitment tool and makes UNM eligible for additional federal grants and contracts, Johansen said.
“Complying with this federal mandate is a high priority for UNM as an institution, and we ask all students and faculty and staff members to make it a personal priority,” she said.
Changes to the survey format have been in the works for over a decade, De Leon said.
“Recommendations were made in 1997 in response to criticism that racial and ethnic standards did not capture the diversity of our population. However, it took a while for those recommendations to translate into standards,” she said. “It has been quite an undertaking, but UNM can be very proud of its implementation. I think our process can serve as a model for other institutions.”
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
De Leon said knowledge of UNM’s diversity makeup is essential for building a strong educational environment.
“It is important for us to know the learning environment at the University is diverse,” she said. “We want students to be able to interact with and learn from individuals who bring diverse experiences and perspectives into the classroom. Race and ethnicity are one aspect of that, however, diversity in all of its manifestations creates the richest and most dynamic learning environment.”
Though response to the survey is not required, a higher response rate is expected with the changes to the survey Bernhard said.
“We have to ask the questions, but it is completely voluntary to
answer the questions for the survey,” she said. “We are really hoping to get a high participation in this because now people are able to select more than one race.
There are a lot of people that are multiracial and nowthey are more accurately represented in the reporting than they have been in the past with only being able to select one race.”
Carol Bernhard, a researcher at Institutional Research, said she
encourages students, faculty and staff to participate in the survey because it ultimately benefits them.
“Now you are able to select all the responses that reflect your identity. We will get richer data from that, as a university in addition to the federal government,” she said. “By answering the survey you can be more accurately represented. Stand up and be counted.”
*“By answering the survey you can be more accurately represented. Stand up and be
counted.”
~Carol Bernhard,
UNM institutional researcher*
