<p>Hi, Northstarmom, you’re replying to an old reply of mine, so I’ll make a fresh reply to your reply. </p>
<p>One of the big reasons I’m enamored of several out-of-state colleges as I think way ahead about my children and where they might apply is the trade-off I experienced as a student at my state university. On the one hand, my state university was ENORMOUSLY more ethnically diverse, and substantially more socioeconomically diverse, than the public high school I attended, because it reflected the whole range of diversity on either of those dimensions found in the state population. I recall a thread where you asked another CC participant if he has ever had any close black friends. For me, my first close black friend was a guy who I knew by name from high school debate tournaments, who was my classmate in my Chinese class from the first day I started taking classes at State U. We were inseparable buddies for as long as we were both at the U. and hung out a lot outside of class. That was an experience I had been looking forward to before I attended the U., because I had had several teachers who did a lot of consciousness-raising about civil rights issues with me. But those teachers and the other open-minded adults (including my parents) I grew up with couldn’t personally undo the undoubted redlining that used to occur in housing patterns in suburban Minnesota, until laws forced the real estate market to open up. (My high school graduating class in the mid-1970s had NO blacks and only two Asian-Americans. That’s a little less weird in mostly white Minnesota than in most states, but I’m glad to report that today, in what was originally an even more blatantly red-lined suburb than the one I grew up in, we have neighbors of every which ethnicity just a few doors down from our townhouse, and my children play with all of them.) </p>
<p>So that was the good news. I went to college, and I had a much more diverse experience (also in terms of meeting both richer, much richer, and somewhat poorer people than I grew up with) than I had had in high school. Alas, I had to stop out of college because I simply didn’t have enough money to go straight through, and my buddy from Chinese class eventually transfered into early admission to a theological seminary, after which I lost contact with him. When I resumed my studies at State U., I continued to meet a varied group of people, but the people I knew best were co-workers, as I had to stay at work continually to pay the rent and pay tuition. </p>
<p>I lived overseas for three years after my undergraduate degree, living in an international dorm with students from every continent and nearly every inhabited island in the world. Then I realized what I had missed by going to the state university in my home state: geographical origin diversity among American students. I have always found it pretty easy to strike up friendships with international students, especially after my own international experience, but when I came back from overseas I had a passionate urge to visit and understand all the parts of the United States I had never been to. Fortunately, my urge was fulfilled when I got work as a contract Chinese-English interpreter and traveled all over the United States. It was on interpreting trips that I first visited your alma mater and its environs, and some of the trips focused on various aspects of higher education in the United States–hence my visit to historically black North Carolina Central University, with extensive conversations with the school officials that I interpreted for a foreign lawyer. </p>
<p>After all that travel, and especially after living overseas and meeting people from countries all over the world, I cherish all aspects of human diversity. I’m glad that there are people at Harvard who are trying to increase the socioeconomic diversity of people entering that school. It happened in my case as a first-year undergraduate that I had considerably more rapport, irrespective of race, with people whose family income level was roughly equal to mine (as was the case with my classmate in the Chinese class) rather than with people arguably of the same ethnic heritage but whose families were wealthier (as was the case with most of my classmates in my freshman biology class, who mostly were premed students). Maybe that’s just me, but that’s how I feel social distance: not by where somebody’s ancestors were living a few centuries ago, or by what kind of visible features someone has, but by how much somebody thinks money is something to be taken for granted. I have observed that for many people racial categories matter a lot in social interaction (and have additionally observed that racial categories aren’t the same in all countries). I’d like my children to continue their current experience of making friends with people from every imaginable ethnic group when they to go to college, and would also like them to be able to meet richer people (which would surely be possible) and poorer people (which is barely possible, in a college environment) when they do that. And I also hope they meet people from all over the world, and specifically from all over the United States. My alma mater is still diverse in the way in way it was when I went to it, and may have more students of color than ever before, but I hope my children can gain admittance to a college that has a much lower percentage of Minnesotans and a much greater percentage of people from all other places when they decide where to apply to pursue their passions. </p>
<p>Thanks for sharing your comments in the thread.</p>