Racial and Economic Stratification on Campus: The Relationship Between Luxury Residence Halls, Race, and Academic Outcomes (2023)

Residence hall design has remained an important topic for higher education professionals, but recently it has garnered attention from audiences beyond the postsecondary sector, including policymakers, donors, and media. In the competitive realm of enrollment management, luxury residence hall designs that emphasize high-end amenities and private rooms are vital in attracting certain prospective students (McClure, 2019). The design of luxury residence halls has created tension between the ideals of equitable educational experiences and increased competition to attract enrollment, as such facilities are often priced beyond the financial reach of students whose presence is essential to creating a diverse educational experience for all students. Rather than creating a more diverse environment, residence hall design has been shown to promote racial and economic stratification in living spaces (Foste, 2021). One form of racialized pattern in student housing is homophily, which is the grouping of students by race or class that permits (or limits) opportunities to interact with persons "like me" (McPherson et al., 2001). Yet, interacting with others of a similar race and economic background has been shown to result in better academic outcomes (Brown et al., 2019). Some researchers found residence hall design played no role in college experiences (Bronkema & Bowman, 2017), while others found isolating designs to be less conducive to flourishing and associated with poorer academic outcomes for Black students when examining Black/White differences (Brown et al., 2019). As university leaders face pressures to increase enrollment, some have allocated millions of dollars to attracting students using a new type of luxury residence hall design—hybrid luxury—that combines high-end amenities and high socialization design (Cramer, 2021; Eligon, 2013). While hybrid luxury halls emphasize added amenities such as coffee lounges, co-working spaces, and exclusive resident-only fitness studios, they also incorporate certain design elements to strategically increase patterns of student socialization. What remains unknown is (a) how emerging hybrid luxury designs may be associated with academic outcomes and (b) whether student academic outcomes differed in other forms of residence hall designs conditioned on race and homophily [End Page 108] opportunity. The focus of this work takes up these two questions.