<p>[Class</a> of 2016 begins a new journey | The University of Chicago](<a href=“Page Not Found | University of Chicago”>Page Not Found | University of Chicago)</p>
<p>This is fascinating - these sorts of people (especially legit D1 basketball players) never looked at UChicago as recently as 5-10 years ago. </p>
<p>I wonder if UChicago is in the process of building a pretty dominant DIII b-ball program? Women’s hoops was already great, now maybe men’s will follow.</p>
<p>I was struck by the level of comfort, as expressed in the article, that these high achieving young African American men felt on the Chicago campus and in the Chicago classrooms. When I was at Chicago in the mid-late 1980s, the percentage of African Americans was no more than 4%, if memory serves me. As a person of color myself, I was always perturbed that more brilliant young African Americans were not choosing Chicago. Has the school finally turned a “diversity corner”?</p>
<p>I doubt it; the current percentage of students who identify themselves as African-American is 5%, although the trend is probably upwards, and it’s maybe a little understated because of the presence of people who register as Blacks in some other categories. And being Black at the University of Chicago does not entail the same kind of isolation that might apply at, say, the University of Idaho. There are a lot of African-Americans in and around Hyde Park, and no one assumes that they are uneducated or unsuccessful.</p>
<p>What it probably means is that these kids, coming out of an academic magnet school, are comfortable being in classes with white and Asian kids, and they are sophisticated enough to know that most likely they will have to “go pro in something other than basketball,” even if they got D-I scholarships. Plus, Chicago may not be costing them much more than D-I would have, and they will get to play together, in front of their families, as starters and stars. It’s not a bad deal at all.</p>