Compelled by the circumstances of Tyler Clementi’s death, the Tyler Clementi Center convened a partnership with four premier postsecondary research centers to better understand the experiences of queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum students attending U.S. institutions of higher education. Our research team reviewed findings from the National Survey of Student Engagement (2017), the Undergraduate Student Experience at the Research University Survey (2016), the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment (2016), and the four surveys conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute, including The Freshman Survey (2016), the Your First College Year Survey (2016), the Diverse Learning Environments Survey (2016), and the College Senior Survey (2017). Through the extrapolation of queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum student responses among these datasets, our research team assembled a snapshot of their experiences at 4-year colleges and universities in the United States.
This snapshot reveals a campus climate that is failing to provide an equitable learning environment for queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum students, along with troubling disparities across academic engagement and student health. In an increasingly data-driven culture, empirical evidence of queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum student experiences is critical not only to the goal of understanding their unique challenges and needs, but paramount to the pursuit of establishing comprehensive resource provisions that ensure their overall success in the academy. Indeed, less than 15% of American colleges and universities have either one full-time employee whose job duties are at least 50% dedicated to, or one graduate assistant who is fully dedicated (20 hours a week), to serving the unique needs of queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum populations.
This paper is a call to action for institutional leaders, faculty, and staff. We have a fundamental responsibility to create a campus climate that relieves queer-spectrum and trans-spectrum students of the burden to navigate stigma without mentorship, develop their own queer/trans-affirming social support networks and resource provisions, and/or be obliged to educate the faculty, staff, and clinicians employed to serve their needs.

This study was funded by the Tyler Clementi Foundation & Rutgers University

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doi:10.7282/t3-44fh-3b16

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