<p>I don’t want to say anything negative about Amherst. Amherst and Swarthmore, along with a small handful of other colleges, have been leaders in committing to diversity. Amherst has done a great job.</p>
<p>I do firmly believe that the campus community at Swarthmore is more fully integrated than at Amherst where there is “theme” housing and occasional reports of concern about de facto segregation in the school paper. My sense is that Amherst’s administration is wrestling with the same kind of jock/non-jock divisions that Williams is attempting to fix with their “new” housing system. That particular divide has racial impact because athletes at elite colleges tend to be overwhelmingly white.</p>
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<p>The only real statistical breakdown of academic performance by ethnicity is some data required by the federal government on graduation rates by race. This data can be a little tricky because the cohort sizes are sometimes so small that you get some fairly wild swings from year to year, especially when broken down by race and gender. </p>
<p>Overall, there appears to be difference in graduation rates by gender at Swarthmore much more than race:</p>
<p>Six year grad rate for 2005:</p>
<p>White
Female: 96%
Male: 87%</p>
<p>Asian American
Female: 100%
Male: 90%</p>
<p>Latino/a
Female: 95%
Male: 73%</p>
<p>African American
Female: 100%
Male: 86%</p>
<p>To show you the year to year swings, the prior year (2004), the grad rate for Latino men was 92%.</p>
<p>I don’t think that there is any noticeable distinction on campus. Swartmore’s URM students are incredibly well-qualified. I think anyone exposed to Swarthmore would be quickly disabused of the notion that emphasizing diversity in admissions requires lowered qualifications. </p>
<p>I’m sure there are indivdual students (white, black, brown, whatever) who struggle academically. There are also students of all ethnicities at the top of the pack academically. Most of the academic support programs originally designed to help a diverse student body have long since expanded to be widely used by student of all types – for example, the excellent 3-day study skills seminar offered to all returning first-year students at the end of winter break.</p>
<p>Judging from a superficial measure like names, it certainly appears that the ranks of Honors grads, Residential Associates, and Writing Associates reflect the student body at Swarthmore. Remember, the campus is only 56% white, just barely half. So the diversity is striking to anyone taking even a casual stroll around campus.</p>
<p>I don’t want to oversell. I have to believe that some minority students can’t help but feel some sense of alienation at an institution that was lily-white for 100 years. That’s true at every elite college. But, relative to other schools, that sort of thing simply doesn’t pop up in the school paper, the administration reports, etc. with any regularity at Swarthmore today.</p>