My best friend spoke to the Admissions director of his HYPMS alma mater yesterday, and he questioned why students with far better academics, extracurricular achievements and service involvement were not admitted from his local magnet school, and after he moved to a much less diverse suburb, students with substantially lower credentials were routinely admitted.
The answer was “diversity”. The AO identified this word as “highly problematic”, but the idea was that the school wanted to create a community of students from varying backgrounds.
I’m interested in why diversity is assumed to be a positive. Here are some data points:
In many suburbs, the state ranking of high schools is inversely proportional to their level of diversity, and community efforts are often transparent in keeping things at the status quo.
Is a school like Stuyvesant High School, Thomas Jefferson High School or UCLA by definition worse because its student body does not mirror the demographics of the United States?
In schools like TJ where more diversity has been forced, academic scores and the rigor of offered courses has been affected by weaker academic students.
There is little data that in diverse schools that students from differing backgrounds, interests, races or cultures mix successfully. For every new student center, there are alcoves of all athletes, all musicians, all asians etc.
As SCOTUS Justice Alito inquired at the SFFA trial - “Why does Harvard need a Squash Team”? And as an ancillary point, why do highly selective schools need athletic recruits, 70% of whom are caucasian and who have academic credentials solidly below the average at their schools?
Can’t we achieve meritocracy by adjusting scores based on context and favoring those who overcome hardship rather than pursuing “diversity” as an end goal?
It seems that diversity is just College code for “we’re going to do what we want for whatever reason we want”. Because diversity can mean anything. Should we all support this complete lack of transparency and accountability in federally funded institutions?
Diversity is typically a positive for the college’s marketing, in that it can sell itself to the largest range of potential students saying or implying “students like you will thrive here!”. Colleges with low diversity tend to have more difficulty attracting students from poorly-represented demographics (e.g. WLU). However, marketing to potential students may compete with marketing to donors or (especially for public colleges) politicians whose preferences may differ from that of potential students.
It is also something that colleges other than perhaps the most locally-focused ones tend to have more of compared to high schools and neighborhoods. Many high schools and neighborhoods are rather homogeneous (both race/ethnicity and SES), while colleges tend to have larger regions from which they draw students. These larger regions tend to be more diverse than high schools and neighborhoods.
For schools like these, the important comparison is the potential student group it draws from (i.e. portions of Virginia and the state of California respectively). These schools are presumably worried about loss of political support (and therefore funding) if they are seen as not serving students from all demographic groups in the regions they draw students from.
Those colleges probably do not want their White student populations falling too quickly, in order to stay marketable to their donors.
Thanks for the answer. I guess I wonder if large colleges draw from a more diverse catchment, won’t they automatically tend to be more diverse in some sense of that word?
What purpose then of pursuing diversity gratia diversity?
If the UCLA experience shows what meritocracy might look like, and that word too is certainly invalid for vagueness, why must diversity step in and change things. Is the demographic makeup of UCLA inferior to the one Dartmouth chooses?
Not sure if this is the direction of this thread. My son went to our #1 school in Illinois 2013-2017. It was a top school also in the US. Think top 10-15. It is a test in school. Only 25% white. You have to score like 99.6 % in certain districts and lower in others. Kids come from all over Chicago. Many 1.5 hours away with bus /mass transit.
Very diverse school. Both my kids wanted to learn with a diversity and didn’t just want kids that looked like them. They went to a private school through 8th grade and really didn’t care for going to school where everyone is the same.
The biggest misconception people have about the mission of elite colleges is that their main goal is to enroll the best academic talent. While that is one goal, these schools have many other institutional priorities which actually preclude them from focusing exclusively on academics - they want sports teams/athletics, an orchestra/band, kids who will be involved in theater, kids from all 50 states, diversity of income/race/gender and, of course, they want to keep alumni and wealthy donors happy. The situation is further complicated by the fact that institutional priorities can change from year to year. Elite schools are never going to go to a rack & stack system - as a result, if you aren’t hooked it is going to be an uphill climb regardless of how smart you are.
I’m not sure I agree with some of the implicit statements here - that top students are afraid to take risks and are careerists. When did wanting to excel at the task at hand appropriate for your age become a bad thing indicative of bad motivations? Also worrying is that the stereotype of the boring, academic drone - who goes so far as to make it difficult for other to learn purely and authentically is all too often wrapped up in ethnic, religious or racial stereotypes. Is mediocrity more indicative of authenticity? Seems so.
Any fair person would want SAT scores, grades, achievement in some way indexed to socioeconomic factors. The issue I have is with the phrase “too many”. Is 50% caucasian students “too many”, is 50% asian students “too many”? Because it’s a zero sum game to 100, that is really the counterpoint to “too few whoever else”. It’s 10cents off for cash or 10 cents more for credit.
And when there are too many any people, schools will use proxies that have nothing to do with indexing of grades or scores. Under this great umbrella of “diversity” that we’ve been taught to respect. Activities and interests assort with race and religion. Have you seen a lacrosse field lately? Or girl’s field hockey? Or crew? How about a piano competition? Now that racial and religious quotas are verboten, Colleges can just pivot to proxies. The TJ case said that’s legal. And that’s the worrisome part.
In many contexts, isn’t diversity about race? Or Religion? Is protesting that Jewish enrollment at Harvard has dropped from 20% to 10% not something that would affect diversity? How about the increase in asian enrollment by nearly 8% immediately after the SFFA case was filed? All these things have immediate effects on “diversity”.
I think we agree that this is one of the problems with diversity. It can mean anything to anyone. Socioeconomic, race, religion, geography, country of origin, gender identity, intention to join ROTC. That’s the blank check being written to colleges to follow the admissions cause du jour.
Just so it’s clear, I think colleges should absolutely be engines of social change, justice and mobility. Underprivileged kids have about 10/10 factors built into the system against them. We need to account for starting kids 20 yards behind the starting line. But I think we need to do that in a way that retains transparency and accountability.
If 1400 from Harlem is equivalent to 1550 from Winnetka, just say that. Why all the secrecy? We know that Yale literally reduces all EC’s, grades, scores and other factors using a rubric into a number. Why keep that secret? Ever see an NFL combine where the meter sticks are visible only to the teams? How about a track meet where runners can’t see their times? Sus.
We’ve had this discussion many times and I guess that it is time to have it again. The elite schools that is typically the crux of discussion here (T20 and T15 of so LACs) are old, private and evolved with their own sense of mission and tradition. They are who they are and will continue to follow their self-defined paths. We often here laments about why aren’t doing admissions like Oxford or Cambridge. They aren’t because it doesn’t fit their sense of self; it never has and never will because their missions aren’t about peak academics but rather elite academics plus additional factors important to themselves.
Harvard needs a squash team because they want one. They are a private institution and they need not answer to us or Alito on this. Sports traditions at these schools are 150 years old in some cases. It is ironic that the first football game included an Ivy League team (Princeton).
MIT supports the largest D3 sports program in the nation. They are very successful in sports as well as academics and obviously find value in fielding teams in over 40 sports. They also have no trouble in finding academically elite athletes since they typically require a recruiting floor of 750 on the Math portion of the SAT.
I’m not sure of the 70% but I don’t doubt it given the large number of prep school sports supported by the Ivy league and other elites (crew, fencing, squash, sailing, etc.). As you bemoan this you might want to note which groups are pouring into squash, crew, and fencing programs as they rapidly grow (hint: it isn’t Caucasians).
The academic inferiority statement is mostly a myth at elite schools, a tired trope. There are many athletes with lesser academic accomplishments (mostly in helmet sports and basketball) but they are generally well qualified. If you check into sports like squash you would find that their academics are on par or above the class as a whole because they are used to meet overall athletic department requirements. In other elite conferences like the NESCAC their is little to no relief of the academic requirements resulting in athletes who can go head to head with anyone on campus while devoting significantly less time to academics. That might be worth spending a few minutes of thought on before setting to keyboard.
Starting off a unsolicited post with “i guess that it is time to have it again” can sound just a tiny bit patronizing. Maybe you’re getting a little too used to talking to your kids?
If Schools were so old and independent, they wouldn’t be getting haled in front of Congress to explain their policies on antisemitism and speech. They are NOT who they are and will continue to be. Ask Claudine Gay.
And as to your bemoan non-caucasians pouring into sports, you might note the actual studies, and there are multiple - all quoted by the NYT quite recently for your enlightened review, that very definitively show that recruited athletes are statistically lower in academic qualifications than other admitted students. By a lot. So they’re actually NOT on par with the class on the whole. But that’s just the data. Maybe as others pour into those sports, the academic numbers will change. Will be interesting to see. And I’m sure someone will study that.
And as to “spending a few minutes of thought” before typing. You should probably educate yourself on topics that have actual answers like the academic credentials of ivy-recruited athletes before dragging yourself to your keyboard to repeat the same inaccuracies.