First-year LGBQ+ students in higher education: who are they and where do they enroll?

Recent decades have seen a growing body of scholarship dedicated to the college experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ+) students. To date, research on LGBQ+ students offers much-needed insight into their postsecondary experiences and outcomes (Rankin et al., 2019), and large-scale surveys indicate the proportion of LGBQ+ students is on the rise (e.g., Eagan et al., 2015; 2017). Yet, other than a breakdown of the types of institutions at which LGBQ+ students enroll (e.g., public and private 4-year colleges and universities) (Eagan et al., 2015; 2017), there is no national snapshot of this group’s demographic characteristics. Further, comparatively little quantitative research on this population exists (Garvey, 2014), with only one national survey, the American College Health Association (ACHA) National College Health Assessment, consistently collecting data on LGBQ+-identified students for more than a decade. Given the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the LGBQ+ collegiate community and the implications of such insight, the purpose of this study is twofold. First, it provides an estimate of the first-year LGBQ+ college student population at specific institution types using national data from entering college students. Second, it yields new information on the characteristics of first-year LGBQ+ individuals in United States higher education. METHODS: Data for this study come from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS). IDEALS—a national, longitudinal study of students’ experiences with and perspectives toward religious, worldview, and other types of diversity (including sexual orientation)—was first fielded in the fall of 2015 to entering students at 122 U.S. college and universities who were recruited based on a national sampling frame that accounted for geography, size, control, and selectivity. Of the 122 institutions, 32 are public (41% of respondents), 32 are Protestant-affiliated (21% of respondents), 29 are private nonsectarian (24% of respondents), 15 are Evangelical Protestant (7% of respondents), and 14 are Catholic-affiliated (8% of respondents). A total of 20,436 students participated in the first wave of data collection; however, data on sexual orientation were only collected from 121 colleges, as one institution opted to omit the sexual orientation question given concerns for student privacy. Additional tests confirmed the exclusion of this institution had no impact on the findings. [End Page 499] White women were overrepresented in the unweighted dataset, while Men of Color were underrepresented. In light of representation issues and to ensure nationally representative results, the dataset was weighted using the “Generalized Raking Method” (see Deville et al. [1993] for an overview of the method). The idea of this approach is to come up with adjustment factors so that the percentages found in a survey match a set of known population percentages. Using computer code publicly available through the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) (INSEE, 2018), weights were constructed to match the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) fall 2015 census of postsecondary enrollment on six dimensions: sex1 (female and male); race/ethnicity (Students of Color and white students); institutional status (private religious, private nonreligious, and public); Carnegie classification (large research or many doctoral programs, many master’s degree programs, and primarily bachelor’s or associate’s degree); geographic region (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), and urbanicity (urban/city-set institution and not-city-set institution). As a reliable, standardized, and transparent data source vetted by the National Center of Education Statistics, IPEDS reduces both biases and missing data potentials. Unless noted, all tables presented in the results are weighted according to conventional weighting practices (Deville et al., 1993). ANALYSES AND RESULTS: We conducted descriptive analyses to examine how many LGBQ+ first-year students enroll at U.S. four-year postsecondary institutions. Of the approximately 3.2 million students who entered college in 2015, the vast majority identified as heterosexual (86.2%, n = 2,775,399). However, with 13.8% of students identifying as LGBQ+ (n = 444,862), this study suggests that the percentage of LGBQ+ students on U.S. campuses is higher than...First author draf