Do people choose a school based on how many people of a particular race attend the school?
@MurphyBrown I defer to you on Chicago, with me only going once, in 2014. I agree that schools give different impressions than stats.
@ucbalumnus ‘Many of the well endowed private schools with the best financial aid still admit about half of their students from families who do not get financial aid (i.e. top 2-3% income/wealth).’ That is a very revealing stat. And I don’t blame schools for admitting the students most likely to succeed and graduate and maybe give some money back. I just wish they’d be more up front about it. Having a good proportion of wealthy URMs definitely makes a college more diverse than one almost entirely white, but I don’t know how much it helps lower income families. Some schools such as Vassar are trying and succeeding in getting their Pell grant numbers above 20%. That at least tells something about economic diversity.
@Proudpatriot They may not admit it.
21 - Diversity is very important to D. There needs to be a critical mass of students like her. So some schools with little diversity won't make the list. For us, focusing on large flagships satisfies her diversity requirement.
I find what @itsgettingreal17 said to be make sense. I’d think that a Hispanic student, for example, might feel a school with a 13% Hispanic student body is a better fit than one with 3%. And the same desire for diversity works for white applicants as well, who may don’t want to go to a college where everybody looks like them. That is not the way the USA is, the world is. So I will concede that the reason colleges seek diversity is not primarily for PR, because diversity will bring in a better applicant pool, and make the college experience richer for everyone.
@Proudpatriot Not how many people of a particular race, but my D17 (who is about as much of a suburban NY white girl as one can be) attends a HS that is pretty diverse, she has a diverse friend group, and she is definitely looking for at least a decent amount of diversity on her eventual college campus.
Any support for this statement?
Older discussion on this question:
As far as whether or not people choose schools based on diversity, I think the answer is sometimes. Looking at some of the UC’s that claim they are diverse, UC Irvine for example, has statistically almost no African Americans which probably discourages that demographic from wanting to go there. They also have very few whites or hispanics relative to California’s population, which probably discourages those groups from attending as well.
In our Midwest HS, the best Asians apply and attend UCB and UCLA disproportionately. A freshman of Korean descent at UCLA posted that he loved LA because he had never been around so many Koreans before.
@Zinhead of course there is support for this statement. There are multiple databases that show the amount of both economic diversity and racial diversity at the top schools, and how much financial aid they provide to the lowest income students and how many low income students they accept. Here’s one for economic diversity, but there are others (and differences in methodology lead to minor differences in results).
Here’s the US News list of percentage of students on Pell Grants (which is a proxy for being really poor or working class, and probably needing a full ride).
Wash U is dead last on this list of several hundred national universities in percentage of working class or poor students. Notre Dame is 4th from the bottom of the list. The highest ranked elite private national university looks to be Columbia, but you have to go way down the list because the most economically diverse universities are all public.
With top LACs, the schools heading the list are Amherst and Vassar. Washington and Lee is dead last, and Colgate is 6th from the bottom.
Here’s another database .
In this one, the top private schools doing most for economic diversity are Vassar, Amherst, Pomona and Harvard. Wash U is 136, Notre Dame is 105. NYU is at the bottom, along with Boston U and Northeastern.
There are also databases for racial diversity. Here’s the most obvious one.
For racial diversity it looks like Notre Dame and Wake Forest have the lowest ranking of any of the top 40 or so National universities. Stanford is the highest, followed by MIT and Columbia.
For top LACs, the top of the list is Amherst, Harvey Mudd and Pomona. At the bottom of the list is see Washington and Lee.
I’m not just making this stuff up.
@ThankYouforHelp - Thank you for your help.
Based on FAFSA4Caster, Pell grant eligibility probably extends up to almost the median level of income of families with high school or college age kids (although the upper part of this income range gets much less than the full Pell grant amount).
@ucbalumnus true, but it still is a reasonable proxy for poor or working class. Median US income is not that high, and does not allow a family to send a student to a college that costs $65,000 a year. If a college is going to take more than a handful of those students, it has to commit a huge amount of financial aid resources to the effort.
I am not disagreeing with your statements, but there is a very good reason why WashU is where it is in terms of financial aid for poorer students. I have written about this in the past, so I am just re-quoting myself here:
Wash U has an endowment of $6.8 Billion dollars. No that is not as much as HYPSM have, but it as much or more than most of the others that are its peers in the rankings. 12th largest endowment of all private universities. Much higher than Brown, or Johns Hopkins, or Vanderbilt, or Dartmouth, or Georgetown, or Boston College, or Carnegie Mellon.
I would not think it fair to expect that Wash U would be at the very top of the economic diversity rankings, but I do wonder why it is dead last among all the elite private schools, and has been for a long long time. Wash U clearly has chosen not to make economic diversity a priority worthy of devoting financial resources to. That’s their call.
WashU reports a very high spend per student, almost implausibly high (can’t find the reference right now). That could factor into the financial aid as well.
Yes, but remember that UChicago’s spend was unsustainable. It laid off some employees and its debt rating was cut.
http://www.collegemeasures.org/4-year_colleges/institution/washington-university-in-st-louis-mo/scorecard/strategic-measures/ indicates that WUStL spends $119,969 per full-time-equivalent undergraduate student.
WUStL does have a medical school, so it is possible that some of the spending in the medical school gets counted in the accounting of spending on undergraduate students due to the existence of some related undergraduate programs.
Undergraduate demographics may differ significantly from the overall university demographics at some schools. So what you observe in walking around campus may not strike you as consistent with the undergraduate data. Visiting a popular undergraduate lecture class may give you a more accurate view.
According to Columbia University stats, 27% of responding US citizens and permanent residents in its undergraduate class of 2019 are Asian or Asian American. When I visited there last Saturday afternoon, it seemed like the percentage was even higher (like, maybe half or more) among students walking around campus or in Butler Library. That may reflect the fact that in some of the graduate programs (engineering for instance), Asian enrollment is extremely high.
UChicago on the other hand perhaps has a higher percentage of white students among graduates than among undergrads these days. But at many “elite” universities in the NE or West Coast, at least, it does seem to be Asians more than any other group who are driving down the percentage of white students. Whites still comprise the largest racial/ethnic category at nearly all of them (a plurality if not a majority). Exceptions include Berkeley, UCLA, and some of the other UCs, where Asians do outnumber whites in the undergraduate student body.
As for economic diversity, aspirations may matter as much as origins in defining a school’s atmosphere.
I’m reminded of something a professor told us years ago at UChicago:
“If you go here, you are automatically upper middle class”.
ThankY