As a minority, I must say that the response to elite school social environments is very complex. Often many URM’s attending elite schools come from predominantly white areas or schools. I was from a low income area, but was in magnet and gifted programs all my life, so I always had a URM group and a core group of friends that was very diverse. When I got to college, I was used to mingling or balancing both “crowds” so to speak. I suspect there are many URMs like me, who are used to it and if they feel it’s comfortable, will definitely choose to mingle without trepidation.
@Suffer : TA’s: depends…if they are lecturing like the instructors, then unless it is a place at the level of HYP (or something like it), then it probably won’t be as good simply because the grad. students at other elites (in STEM) are good, but maybe not as good as those, so they can’t or won’t be willing to teach high level material. If you are one of these schools, better to allot TAs to their comfort zones. Like in biology or whatever, you may want to get them to host primary article discussion sections as opposed to recitation style sections. This allows them to discuss the area they specialize in and thus they are more likely to be competent. It depends on the roles assigned to them. I was pleasantly surprised when I went for coffee and saw how my school is now using graduate students. The general chemistry sections do not do lecture anymore (starting this year) but apparently are doing case based and problem based learning, so what they are doing is basically training the grad. students how to teach (or at least be competent in facilitating learning) by making them mediate the discussion and problem solving at each table. This makes sense to me because honestly, a lot of them are actually less capable of running recitations or mentoring sessions than strong undergrads. If they are trained early in a supervised (the pbl class-where the head instructor is directing things) or comfortable (the discussion sections I allude to), then they can probably get better at teaching. However, sometimes I am also worried about certain professors themselves and not the TA’s, I mean, I know they have competing demands, but some should try a little harder.