Diversity. Why is it good? Why is it a goal of Universities?

Applying to College
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Here’s an article. Specifically, the article shows that an athlete with only a 1% chance of admission based on academics has a 98% chance if recruited for athletics. The article also references two studies showing that athletes have lower aggregate academic performance. Another study shows that this difference extends after college into the likelihood that athletes will end up with a prominent job or prominent faculty position. That’s where athletes differ from other privileged hooks. Legacies tend to have higher academics than other admits.

And does that even matter? Well, 18% of Princeton undergrads are athletic recruits. Add legacy to that, and you might start to see one problem with “diversity”. It allows for some very large and counterintuitive results. Like - why would a school that is so invested in social leveling and diversity choose to value those sports that lead to a 70% recruitment domination by the privileged? Other data show that recruited athletes are largely much more privileged and wealthy. Happy to provide citations.

The data is the data. The fact that you visualize squash players as smart and “helmeted sports and basketball” athletes as less smart is… something we should all really think about. Maybe you could sketch a representative squash player and basketball player for us?

When you talk about people pouring into squash, are you talking about Egyptians?

Sunlight disinfects. Perhaps if Colleges were more transparent on how they are achieving their “diversity”, some of this would make more sense.

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The assumption that “diversity” means “social leveling” is not necessarily correct for any given college. For highly selective private colleges, it may mean only a small window of opportunity for the most meritous of the less privileged to enter the realm of wealth and power while still largely functioning as confirmations of the next generation scions of wealth and power.

Other schools may have other motivations regarding diversity. For example, the Texas public universities’ rank-based admission system helps keep them in good standing politically across the state, since high school students from all parts of the state can be admitted to them.

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because if you spend college in a bubble, you will not be well-prepared for the number of different experiences and backgrounds the people you will meet in the “real world” will have. colleges wanting to have students from a diverse range of backgrounds means a) more opportunities for a student who does not match the majority to find community at the institution and b) more opportunities for every student to learn from their peers.

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Students who are not recruited athletes would seem to be in position to influence this by favoring colleges at which varsity athletics (with attendant lower academic standards for athletes) are deemphasized. However, it seems that many college applicants are drawn to that of which they are critical.

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Meaning larger schools, where the number of athletes is small compared to the total student population, right?

For example, the percentage of athletes at Mississippi State is much smaller than at Hamilton. Mississippi State also does not have lower admission standards for recruited athletes.

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Mississippi State doesn’t have to manufacture “diversity” either.

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I’d be interested in a wider ranging interpretation of this. For example, Reed does not offer varsity athletics, Caltech reputedly maintains high academic standards for athletes, and UAA schools appear to support their athletic programs in a desirable balance with other programs.

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I think that diversity is important for the reasons you cite, but I don’t think elite institutions are necessarily providing that kind of diversity. Elite schools ARE a bubble and I don’t think one’s experience at an Ivy type school is in any way representative of life in the real world.

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There’s a lot to say if this is a genuine question, but here is a very brief list that hopefully adds to others’ responses:

  1. Fairness. Nikole Hannah-Jones has an important recent essay on this in NYT. It’s a long read, but in essence, it is about every effort to reverse the abject unfairness, cruelty and violence that has been imposed upon segments of our society, and how you can’t just stop doing those things (even though they haven’t stopped and are sometimes just disguised better) and claim everything is fair and neutral again after you’ve put millions of people at a massive disadvantage. This, to me, is by far the most important reason it’s important to consider students’ background and uplift those whose families have been suppressed for generations and are still getting called “diversity hires” no matter where they go and how qualified they are by traditionally accepted standards. Our society is better for giving everyone a chance and a seat at a table, even if that means asking someone who’s been there a while to scoot over a little.
  2. Student experience. We spend our lives surrounding ourselves with people like us. Diving into different and challenging perspectives is good for students.
  3. UCLA does reflect the California population pretty well, as far as I know. I’ve looked fairly recently but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Regardless, the UC system exists, as public services do, to serve and educate the population of California. It doesn’t exist to please your HYPSM friend who has somehow gotten hold of dozens of applications from one suburb and then another to be able to judge merit as he or she assumes it should be. But the premise that we can judge who was more or less qualified without reading every application is baseless. My kid was rejected from their No. 1. Three others from the same high school were accepted, one with an athletic scholarship and two (white) students who, my guess is, probably didn’t score as high as my kid. Maybe their grades weren’t even quite as good, though they might have been. But I happen to know something they did that I, as an admissions officer, would consider worthy of admission to this prestigious private school in their major. But I would never have known that without randomly being in the right place at the right time. To claim a bunch of kids were less qualified than others is just unfair unless you are reading their applications and know what your university is looking for.
  4. While selective colleges may choose some applicants whose stats that are commonly thought of as the most important — GPA, rigor and scores — are lower, the straw man here is that these schools are choosing unqualified applicants because they satisfy some “diversity” standard. This is not the case. These schools might pick a candidate with lower GPA, but not a low GPA. They have more than enough traditionally “qualified” applicants that everyone is qualified, even if they don’t have a 4.0.
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While I generally agree with the above statement, I also think that as adults, we often sort ourselves into various bubbles after in our residences, workplaces, and social venues so in fact there can be similarities between the bubble of a student’s college life and the bubble of their life as an adult. Just to clarify. I am not arguing that bubbles are a good thing. I am just saying that lots of adults are living pretty insular lives as far as I can tell.

For me the most important reason for diversity in academia is that it is harder to have a robust academic program if all students are coming from homogeneous backgrounds and similar pre-college experiences. I am particular concerned with any courses that depend upon discussion and project based learning as well as disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Diversity and even friction are the sparks that help students generate original works and scholarship (analytical, research, and creative). Furthermore in some fields, the lack of diverse perspectives can sometimes lead to incorrect assumptions and conclusions in classroom discussions or research. A simple example is a public policy course focused on childhood poverty, but the students misunderstand some basic facts about navigating TANF and Medicaid because none of them actually grew up poor.

In any case, the world continues to evolve and change; therefore our classrooms need to continue to evolve and change. Encouraging new and unexpected voices in the classroom is good for all students and professors. Their presence can help foster new conversations, exploration, and innovation.

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Here’s UCLA’s undergrad student race breakdown from the 2023-24 CDS. I expect a significant proportion of the 7.7% international (nonresident) students are Asian, but didn’t factor that into the Asian percentage. Also, I’m ignoring the two or more race and race unknown data points

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We don’t have the exact data we need to ascertain whether the racial makeup of UCLA mirrors that of California (ideally would have the last four years of HS grads by race). Here is the 2022-23 public school racial breakdown (with which UCLA’s student body does not closely align…Hispanics/Blacks are underrepresented, Whites and Asians are overrepresented):

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Because the students at Yale get to decide whether or not Fencing is important?

Based on the attendance at squash matches and fencing tourneys, the students at Yale (and Harvard) care basically zero about those sports. I think for multiple years when Harvard won the Ivy and National title for Squash (both for men and women) there were fewer than 20 non-squash team people in the gallery.

So your answer is if you don’t like the ridiculous advantage given to an multiply privileged group given by college administrators, go somewhere else? I wonder if you feel the same way about students who complain about campus antisemitism. Should they vote with their feet too? Some believe that.

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It is certainly a genuine question, and your experience is illustrative of a few points.

  1. 100%, fairness is the goal. Schools should index everything based on context including socioeconomic factors, family environment, geography and any other local or personal factor that could be relevant. Almost every so-called metric for admission is tightly correlated, so every factor should be considered based on context.

  2. It is the exception and not the rule that college brings unlikes together. Perhaps in a vaguely incremental way, but between the ecosystems of academics, interests, athletics, fraternities, finals clubs, Hillel, secret societies and activities, like finds like pretty fast. And that’s without even considering race. Does some mixing happen? Yes, sometimes. Does it happen to a reliably consistent degree? Not really. I’ve talked to multiple college administrators about this over a decade, and it’s a perennial topic of frustration and discussion. You can build the student center, but you can’t make people mix.

  3. I don’t believe in the straw man that unprepared students are being admitted for diversity. I think “unprepared” students who get a lot of B’s and C’s freshman year should be admitted. How else can we be sure we’re identifying enough underprivileged students who we could not fairly expect to ace the curve from the moment they arrive at MIT? Some students will catch up. And those who don’t - Honestly I think that’s the price society pays for societal unfairness. Many, many may disagree here - I’m sure.

My issue with “diversity” as a goal is that the most frequently used definitions of “diversity” lead to unfair results. For example, as is well discussed above, the “diversity” of needing elite athletes from wealthy families who still can’t meet average academic standards. If 1 in 5 caucasian students at Princeton is a recruited athlete with sub-par academics (as a group), and those athletes have massively higher than average wealth, isn’t that the opposite of your (and my) definition of fairness? Shouldn’t those students from wealth be held to the highest academic standard?

Diversity is also routinely used to limit the number of minorities to a quota. These are anything but gone after SFFA. The TJ case this year lets schools establish quotas, they just have to pick other factors to accomplish them than race. For example, it’s not okay to set a quota for girls at 50%, but you can set a quota on students whose hair is > 3 inches long.

Though I suspect we agree on some points, we disagree about my friend’s experience. Between my friend, my wife, her sister and me, we have been involved with admissions for 3/5 HYPMS schools for over 20 years each. And we have been involved in different geographies. As our families have moved from city to suburb to suburb, we have seen stark differences in rigor in activities and academics between areas. Even with the ongoing abandonment of rich suburbs by elite schools, the standards are just not comparable to what any of us saw coming out of - for example - Bergen Academies or Stuyvesant.

If schools are really about fairness, a much better goal than diversity, they should be transparent. By saying that "just getting a 1600 on the SAT, just getting 10 5’s on AP’s, just starting a community shelter that helps 500, just having a 4.33 unweighted GPA, just being concertmaster of your regional orchestra, just about anything isn’t enough to get admitted, the result is a weird dyad of consequences. On the one hand, achievement nihilism. Nothing matters. Everyone who has ambition is foolish or an unauthentic, naive striver. If you’re not wining the US Junior Open, you might as well quit tennis because it “won’t matter”. On the other hand, endless and destructive pressure. You have kids who get a 1550 on the SAT and take the test again to try to get a 1600 or kids who feel pressured to take so many AP’s or devote so much time to their soccer training that their academics suffer. Because it doesn’t matter unless you are “nationally great” and even then - no.

That is the harvest of secrecy that is implicit with “diversity”. Not fair to the kids and not fair to the system. The only beneficiaries are the schools who want to maintain complete carte blanche.

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I feel like Princeton deserves some credit for helping a lot of people from underprivileged backgrounds be successful. Could they do more? Sure.

One can have a vision about what a school “should do”, but any vision requires support. The hard parts are fundraising and building a vibrant alumni community. The vision, alumni sentiment, and fundraising are all connected.

We may not like how Princeton selects students. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that Princeton is able to identify students who will support the school as alumni. The alumni giving rate is the highest of all universities. The per-student endowment is also the highest. For comparison, those figures are each about double what they are for MIT.

Anyway, before criticizing Princeton and feeling like one deserved to be admitted, one might do some introspection. Am I the type of person who supports my college like a Princeton alum support theirs? Or am I more like an MIT alum? Or am I less generous than that? What have I contributed? How have I helped?

The answers to these questions reveal more than an SAT score.

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The stated focus on diversity is not real. The real focus of these schools is maintaining the privilege of the already privileged. Basically, they serve the same purpose as country clubs do. Country clubs are not about golf and tennis, they are about mixing with the “right” people. It’s gross, so these schools disguise it by talking about diversity. They admit just as few of the “wrong” people as they can get away with without provoking too much public and legal outcry (who the wrong people are changes slowly over the years, but there are always wrong people.)

So my idea was a public rack-and-stack national university. It wouldn’t give points for sports or bogus ECs. All students would qualify for “in-state” tuition. Outstanding education. No frills. You wouldn’t even need to build anything, just take over one of the many campuses of the schools that are going under. It would employ outstanding profs from across the country, including recently retired faculty who want a few more years of teaching in the company of other outstanding profs and brilliant students. I think it’s a great idea, but I recognize that I’m just about the only one who thinks so.

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I note strongly-affiliated religious colleges do in fact still exist, with admissions policies to match. Most people here do not think much about them, having already voted with their feet, but that is still a de facto decision they have made.

Same thing with single gender colleges–those also still exist, but again lots of people have voted with their feet (meaning men not attending men’s colleges, and women not attending women’s colleges).

But I think part of the answer to your puzzle is that these private universities do not just have students as stakeholders they need to consider. They also have faculty, staff, alums, grant-providers, and donors, among others. And we know from cases where, say, these universities have tried to cut some varsity sports, sometimes there was significant outcry from alums and potential donors. Only a fraction of alums and donors, of course, but enough that it became a concern for the institution.

In the end, though, the big picture is these universities are in a very competitive marketplace, indeed a multi-sided, differentiated-product market. And that means the individual colleges are trying to offer all sorts of different features and programs and experiences and so forth to try to appeal to different possible students and faculty and donors and so on.

And so yes, you as an individual prospective student might not appreciate some of what any individual college offers, but that just means you should look for the colleges that offer more of what you care about. And if you are like most people, you will find that there is no perfect college for you, there are instead just a range of different tradeoffs and compromises and resources being used in ways you don’t care about. Which makes sense as it would be hard to be competitive appealing to just one sort of person. But you can choose the college which gets the balance as close to what you would want as you can find.

And you can call that voting with your feet, but you can also just call it making an informed consumer choice. Either way, it is what is available to you as a consumer in these complex markets.

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I think the basic issue is for this “national” university to serve a non-trivial percentage of the US college population, it would actually have to be a system of many national universities. And to be competitive for students, this system would cost many billions in start up capital, then many more ongoing billions in operating funding and new capital investments.

And in fact, if it was going to serve a meaningful percentage of the US population, it would very likely force a standardization of curriculums and assessments at the secondary level. It would also de facto compete with and ultimately eliminate a lot of the state-level public universities.

And we have no tradition of that in the US. The service academies are a minor exception, but otherwise we have left it to states and localities to create and fund public education at all levels. Moreover, for good or ill local and state control of curriculums and assessments is cherished by many. So it would be a tremendous political lift.

None of which is to say I would personally vote against it, but I am the sort of person who is all for more nationalization of public education. As of now, though, I recognize I am in a small minority of the US voting public.

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It would be nice to have a system that has transparency. It’s hard to see really great students and well-meaning parents trying to decypher the impossible code of “necessary but insufficient” and “authenticity” which is apparently a quality that no amount of time, commitment or hard work can prove to the skeptical 30 minute interviewer or online commentator. We are in a world where doing more work somehow is taken to equate with less sincerity.

I was at an admissions meeting this year where a student was discussed who had worked in a retina lab for 2 years and pubished a peer-reviewed article on his ophthalmology research. He was a first-generation student, an immigrant whose mother was an optometrist (not an ophthalmologist) in a foreign country. Despite 2 years of work and this significant contribution to current research, the interviewer said, to the nodding heads of many in the room, that the accomplishment “just seemed insincere” because the student’s mom was an optometrist, and it looked like the kid was just “doing it for his mom”. All based on a 30 minute conversation - two years of learning, committment and struggle down the toilet. In my opinion, disgusting.

Systems like the one you suggest exist in many countries - very successfully. The situation is a bit like healthcare. The USA claims to have the best doctors, because at the very top, we lead the world in some limited areas in innovation. In the same way, there is an opportunity in the USA for the very best students to excel. Below this elite level, which many access through connections, savvy and wealth, we rank as a nation among the most expensive and worst in the world in terms of health outcomes. We are not among the top countries for education.

Every time someone mentions the benefits of foreign test-based educational systems like the one you describe, the conversation turns to how the “iphone” can’t have been discovered by a boring, academic drone. Disruptors, we are told, only come from the good-'ol fashioned ignorant class that doesn’t know enough to hold back their natural instinct to innovate. Holding a Patent and having written tens of scholarly articles, I can’t say I can agree with that argument.

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