We did consider some universities like Tuskegee, so there’s one data point.
A bias against the deep south, the Midwest or either coast based on what kind of people I think live there (and how someone told me they behave) is exactly the same as any other form of cultural bias.
Your friend makes some good points and you should give what he had to say some thought. Speaking anecdotally, I grew up in a town that was 95% white, very affluent, but moved later in life and graduated from a high school which was minority white. I think what a lot of people on this thread might have missed is that people who grow up in insulated, white communities often have idealized views of what people of color are like - fearing that they will be perceived as racist, they overcompensate and develop a mental image of racial minorities which is just unrealistic. When they encounter people from different backgrounds for the first time, this mental image is shattered as they realize that people of color are either 1. like everyone else, some of them are good some not so good or 2. if they go to a rough, urban school where a lot of their peers couldn’t care less about learning, the culture shock could lead them to develop racist views and generalize this experience to people of color at large. When I was finishing up high school, #2 was certainly my experience. Today I am no longer a racist but I have transitioned from a liberal on race to someone who is very conservative on the subject in that I oppose all affirmative action policies.
The idea that exposure to people of different backgrounds leads to greater understanding and appreciation is known as contact theory and it is widely panned by individuals and scholars across the political spectrum. It is a fanciful notion and misunderstands how people from insulated communities develop their views on race.
Ok, I’m lost. In one paragraph of #22 the assertion is made that people in isolation develop unrealistic opinions of others. In the last two paragraphs I read an assertion that contact with others causes unrealistic opinions.
A and B are simultaneously presented as mutually exclusive AND with an intersection that encompasses the whole set.
“As I approach my college years, I am kind of excited about the opportunity to meet and mingle with other students that may come from a very different cultural, socio economic, racial and religious background than I. I feel that I will become a better person for it.”
I think that you will be a better person for having mingled with a wide range of people from a wide range of backgrounds.
I grew up in an area that was almost entirely white. There was one black person at my highschool (he was popular, very nice and a great hockey player, leading to the obvious stereotype that all black men are very nice and great hockey players). Since I went to school in the US outside of my native country (Canada) I was invited to foreign student events and got to meet people from all over the world. I remember having a good friend from England when I was in graduate school, and admiring a student from China whose work ethic was strong. I have worked for the past 30 years in an area where I work closely with people from all around the world and have very close working relationships with people who fit pretty much any description that you can dream of. I have frequently worked with people from China, Japan, India, all across Europe, Mauritius, Africa, on occasion the Caribbean and South America, and some other places. It is great to interact and work with this wide range of people.
I think that one area which causes a lot of friction is where there is a perception that middle class people who are born in the US are disadvantaged because of race or origin. One example I can give of this is that right now in the engineering team that I work with (in the US) there are almost no US-born engineers left that are less than 40 years old (there might be one out of about 300). I honestly can’t tell you what has happened to the white US-born software engineers, but I am not seeing them. People feel that they are being replaced. Many people in the more liberal parts of the US are not noticing the extent to which people have noticed that they are being replaced, and mistake “I don’t want to be replaced” with racism.
There is a failure to communicate here. The best way to fix the failure to communicate is to talk to people, and meeting people from many backgrounds and many parts of the US and the world is a good start towards improving communication.
Im probably going to be the closest one in the thread to agreeing with your friend. However, I see it differently then him.
Basically, I believe he is right in the sense that diversity is “over-rated” in that these days diversity is seemingly being forced upon people/institutions, in that its an issue if something is not diverse enough, when it should not be. Homogeneity does secure and protect culture, however in all honesty the rural farmer from the Midwest does not have anything to worry about because a vast majority of immigrants go to cities for employment. As such, your friend’s argument has value in that statistically there has been more PERSONAL conflict in today’s age due to the way we treat culture, where as in the past these same ethnic conflicts occurred on a national scale (usually colonization related wars). The main issue of cultural conflict is that we expect a “melting pot” (a phrase many in APUSH have heard), and in that we expect people to assimilate into American culture, whatever the current administration deems as American culture, and in that naturally give up some aspects of themselves to do so. Canada, in my opinion, still has these conflicts but to a lesser degree because they talk about diversity as a “mosaic of vast dimensions and great breath”, and as such see everyone as truly separate (a mosaic is a mix of different pieces to make a whole) but equal. As such, diversity is not celebrated, but rather expected to be on its own. The conflicts your friend speaks of are mainly due to the American expectation of melting in, and as such people have difficulty melting in without conflict. Granted, I do think that too much diversity pandering can destroy culture, (just look at Sweden, to me its supposed to be ethnically Swedish people, but all the migrants are slowly eliminating them from their own country).
TLDR: I think OP is right in that more diversity is better for your academic development, but there is such a thing as to much diversity.
@ANormalSeniorGuy , what? I can’t let your statements go unchallenged. Not all Swedes are blonde and blue -eyed. This thread is truly frightening if kids in college are buying into this absolute claptrap. If you want to see an example of people who have amongst the highest living standards in the world, you will find the Swedes, not Americans.
Quite amazing how people growing up in a land where crazy people can and do commit mass murder with free access to guns are more concerned about sensationalized news stories. You will find that here in the good old USA you still have a much better chance of being shot, getting an inferior education, and dying in childbirth than you do in Sweden. Let me ask you how the increase in immigrants has affected your life here. Probably not much. I think you might benefit from finding out how many Swedes have in fact been killed by refugess, then compare how many Americans have been killed by home-grown lunatics. The numbers will surprise you. Sweden will still be Sweden, despite refugees.
There’s such as thing as too many guns, too many Big Macs, too many shopping malls, too much waste, too much poverty, too much ignorance and too much intolerance. I don’t think too much diversity comes anywhere near the other issues I named.
Now if you want to hear a story about diversity, albeit from the perspective of a white person, here it is: I grew up poor. We ate welfare food. I lived in the mountains and put bread bags over my shoes when it rained. So I knew about being poor. Then I moved to a wealthy area. I went to college. Then I travelled and eventually settled overseas in one of Europe’s most diverse and populated cities. I lived there for half my life by the time I moved back. My child went to school in this city literally with kids of every skin color and every faith. A mosque and a temple and a church were all within waking distance of my home. People got along just fine.
Sure, there were probably murders, probably nasty, racist incidents, but meanwhile here in America there were a bunch of massacres and David Duke was still pretty famous. So I guess it all balances out equally, but there is literally zero evidence that too much diversity is a bad thing. Meanwhile, I have never seen such blatant racism hiding behind nationalism in my 50+ years on this planet as I have seen in the last couple of years in this land of the free and the home of the brave. What a sad state of affairs. I truly hope that the majority of today’s college students are not all buying into this kind of thinking.
One of the reasons I advise students to go to college in another part of the country is because lacking things like the draft, we as Americans don’t know each other. It is too easy to make a mental meme of people we encounter only through media.
There have always been mass migrations and periods of adjustment. Retreating into our bubbles extends the integration process.
The rural midwestern farmer sees diversity all the time. Who do you think is bringing the crops in? Who is manning the canneries? Who is processing your Thanksgiving turkey? That town that I mentioned above has industries that would collapse without the new immigrants.
The perception is probably a misinterpretation of the uncertain future prospects for the middle class. The economy is becoming more unequal and less meritocratic, with the likely result that the middle class will shrink, with more of the current middle class and their kids being downwardly mobile than upwardly mobile. With a “shrinking pie”, people tend to become meaner and look for additional ways to exclude competition for their jobs or economic class position (including by race, ethnicity, religion, etc.).
Note also that middle class anxiety about uncertain future economic prospects is also fed by the apparent faster pace of change in labor markets, sometimes faster than humans can adapt and retrain to new jobs that get created as old jobs become obsolete. Also, new jobs may be in different regions, while some people may have other constraints (e.g. spouse/family) that limit their ability to move to different regions (there is a recent thread about someone considering moving for the spouse’s job, but which would result in a less desirable situation for the high school student’s college prospects). A coal miner in West Virginia looking at declining coal demand and impending closure of the mine and/or automation replacement of labor at the mine might not be comforted by the availability of jobs building and installing solar panels in the sun belt, or building and installing wind turbines in the plains.
The pace that humans can adapt and retrain to new jobs is also slowed down by increasing credentialism and professional licensing requirements for many jobs. Jobs that used not to require a bachelor’s degree now often specify that as an initial screening, even if no general skills indicated by a bachelor’s degree nor major-specific skills are needed for the job. Of course, education and training is now more expensive, and more likely to be born by the individual, rather than subsidized by the employer or done on the job. In other words, the barriers to retraining for new jobs are higher now than before, contributing to middle class anxiety.
I do see US-born software developers younger than 40 (including white and non-white ones), but they do have a tendency to move to smaller startup environments more than others (probably because some of the non-US-born are on work visas and find it more difficult to change jobs or get visa support from startups).
However, one thing I did notice decades ago was that white students in engineering tended to have a higher attrition rate than other students, so that the percentage of white students at the engineering graduation was oddly low compared to the percentage of white students in the frosh level courses for engineering majors (or the school overall). This was at a school with direct admission to engineering majors and a 2.0 college GPA requirement to continue, so it was not one which actively weeded out students after enrollment (unlike some schools where enrolled students start in pre-engineering and have to compete by college GPA to get into their majors).
More recently, I attended an engineering graduation and noticed the same relative lack of white engineering students graduating. Although it is true that overall demographics of the state and the state university have become less white over the decades, the small number at the engineering graduation was still greatly underrepresented compared to what one might expect compared to demographics of college frosh.
So perhaps the lack of young white people in engineering and computing may have something to do with where they are earlier in the pipeline. (It probably does not help that some flagship universities in states with higher white populations practice deliberate weeding in their engineering programs.)
Note, however, that many students and parents have financial constraints that may limit them to in-state public universities and community colleges, often just the ones in commuting range (though these local colleges may still be more diverse in some ways than high schools due to their larger service areas). So most students may not be able to do college in another part of the country even if they wanted to. The students with the academic credentials to attend good-financial-aid private colleges or earn large merit scholarships, or with parents willing to pay private or out-of-state public school prices, are probably outliers among college-bound students overall.
Snowball city, many of those rural Midwestern farm families likely trace their own roots to other countries at a
time when they were the new minority. The odd thing about people playing us vs them is how we forget the many ways all of us differ.