Cornell University prides itself as being a socially and racially diverse campus. Nearly half of all students are of non-Caucasian descent, and there is a rather significant number of each underrepresented minority in attendance. Knowing this, one would expect to see a melting pot of unparalleled proportions when strolling through campus. Cornell undergraduates, however, know very well that this is not the case. If one spends no more than a single day on Cornell’s campus, one will notice the large degree of self-segregation inherent in students’ daily lives. In particular, races tend to segregate themselves through their housing, and with whom they choose to eat meals at campus dining halls.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education explores this phenomenon at the nation’s most prestigious universities. In a 2003 article, the issue of Black students segregating themselves by living in special Black program houses is discussed. At many top colleges, and Cornell in particular, a relatively significant portion of Black students opt to live in such dormitories. For instance, more than 1/5^th of all Black Cornellians choose to live in Ujamaa. The article goes on to mention that while this proportion is not significant compared to the entire Black population on Cornell’s campus, it is surprising that 1/5^th of all Black students would prefer to live with only other Black students. But do these students who choose to live in Ujamaa really feel strongly that they live only with other Black students? Perhaps not.

Thomas Schelling’s model set forth in Micro Motives and Macro Behavior would suggest that these students do not have to feel so strongly about it in order to achieve this result. Approximately 4.7% of Cornell’s undergraduate population is Black. If you remove 1/5^th of these that choose to live in Ujamaa, only 3.75% of all students living in Cornell’s standard dormitories are Black. If a student chooses not to live in Ujamaa, then only 1 in 27 students on this individual’s dorm hall would hypothetically be Black. We know that students of a similar race are more likely to be of a similar social background and share some common experiences. If such students choose to live in a regular dorm, they may feel inundated by the overwhelmingly large proportion of other races. Knowing this, a student may choose to live in Ujamaa even if he or she wants to ensure living with just a very small proportion of Black students. For instance, perhaps some students would like to ensure that at least 10% of those they live with are of a similar background to themselves. According to Schilling’s logic, it would be nearly impossible to achieve an equilibrium including black students in regular dorms through random chance. Black students would have to be purposefully grouped together on halls by the housing commission in order to satisfy even the lowest thresholds. Even at a threshold as low as 4%, a student would need to choose the all-Black dorm in order to ensure he or she is living with others like him or her. The issue is further complicated by the fact that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. With each Black student that chooses to live in Ujamaa, it makes every other Black student less likely to want to live in regular dorms, because it decreases the probability of being surrounded by other Black students. In essence, allowing students to segregate themselves actually promotes this sort of behavior, even if students do not really want to do so in the first place.

The article mentions that such program houses are bad for integrating races, and several Cornell representatives quoted in the article seem to agree. So why does Cornell still allow these dorms to exist? Well, if a Black student is deciding between attending Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, and he can feel more comfortable about his housing arrangement knowing that he can meet his threshold at the latter, he will choose Penn. Cornell has to keep these program houses to compete with other schools for admissions; otherwise some minorities will choose to attend other schools just to meet their housing comfort thresholds. For this reason, program houses are quite prevalent at top-tier schools. Everyone might be better off if they all got rid of them, but no school has incentive to deviate from the norm, because it is unlikely that any other school would follow suit.