Are Colleges Promoting More Diversity?

More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, there is a consensus among K-12 educators that students benefit from working side by side with others who are ethnically diverse. The same is true within higher education since the skills needed in a global economy are best developed through exposure to diverse people and cultures.

“There’s a lot to be said about being in a diverse class with people who are different from you. I think it partners with the academic experience significantly,” says Courtney McAnuff, Vice President for Enrollment Management at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “When you sit in a class at Rutgers, I do think you see the world around you.”

U.S. News & World Report ranked Rutgers-Newark the most diverse university in the U.S. since it began ranking colleges on the diversity of their student body in 1997. U.S. News ranks the percentage of minority students - excluding international students - represented on each campus. Interestingly, schools whose enrollment is made of up of mostly one ethnic group – such as historically black colleges - score very low.

How Colleges Cope with Diversity

“While we do nothing in the admission decisions that focus on admitting students of color, we do try and build the applicant pool by bringing students to campus for a series of events that we plan to get them to see what kind of environment it is,” says McAnuff. “We’re the only public research university that sets aside 10 percent of its applicant slots for low income students.”

One unique program Rutgers has is their “Future Scholars” program, where students are identified by their seventh grade teachers as having academic promise and are of “‘high need” financially: “families on public assistance, wards of the state, families in public housing, and so forth.”

“That’s a program where Rutgers offers full tuition scholarships to 200 inner-city seventh graders each year,” says McAnuff. “The young people are promised that if they can earn regular admission – it’s not a special admission program – they will not pay any tuition.”

Rutgers actually invests a lot by bringing those students on campus in the summer and provides tutoring and mentoring during the course of the school year. The program is in its fifth year and at the end of this year, Rutgers will have 1,000 young people participating.

“We’ve been able to do that because we have partnerships with many businesses and foundations,” says McAnuff.

Arizona is another state with a diverse population; the University of Arizona (UA) had 7,300-students in its freshman class for 2011, and was the most diverse in University history, up 4.5 percent. This included 1,800 Hispanic students (up 4 percent), more than 625 Asian American students (up about 75 students), more than 350 African- American students (up about 50 students), and about 200 Native Americans students.

“We’ve concentrated on recruiting all students, so we haven’t done anything special for different groups,” says Dr. Kasey Urquidez, UA assistant VP for Student Affairs and Dean of Admissions.

UA also has an early academic outreach unit that goes to area school districts to let the younger students know what the admissions requirements are. They have a separate group of recruiters who target 10th -12th graders to make sure the students have a good understanding of what courses they need to take and how they need to prepare.

“They’re doing this at most of the high schools in Tucson and if there really seems to be a need to create that ‘college-going culture,’ they might spend more time there,” says Urquidez.

UA also has about 500 “Arizona Assurance Scholars” who get the main cost of their education covered by the University if they meet certain academic and low-income criteria. UA recently initiated a semester-long symposium, "Debating Diversity: Approaches to Equity and Opportunity in a Changing Democracy," to promote understanding of diversity issues.

But those issues were much different from the 10 campuses in the University of California system, which took part in a “restorative justice” training session in January 2012 - a conflict resolution process used when dealing with intolerant conduct that may not actually violate any laws - after a series of highly charged racial and religious campus incidents.

The Politics of Campus Diversity

The U.S. Supreme Court announced in February 2012 that it would take up a lawsuit challenging “race-conscious admissions” at the University of Texas, setting the stage for the Court to reconsider affirmative-action policies it had ruled constitutional in 2003. The case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, is the first challenge to the use of race in college admissions since the 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in which the Court upheld affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Michigan.

The Obama administration has sided with the University of Texas, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund President John A Payton issued the following statement, “We trust that the Court will reaffirm that the educational benefits of diversity are a compelling interest that colleges and universities can and should pursue for the good of our students, our communities, and our nation."

The Future College Experience

No doubt students will need to learn how to interact in a diverse environment since the Census Bureau projects that by the year 2100, the U.S. minority population will become the majority with non-Hispanic whites making up only 40 percent of the population.

“Everything is becoming more diverse out there, so students are more diverse coming out of high school,” says Urquidez.

“I think the main thing (Rutgers) is trying to do is be reflective of the state that it serves and to make sure all our citizens have an opportunity to go to school,” says McAnuff, who hopes the Rutgers program can be a model for other Universities.

“We’re working out a blueprint that we hope can be replicated with the ‘Future Scholars’ as a base,” says McAnuff. “So we are actually research partners now with Columbia University and with our own research teams to make sure we document everything we’re doing.”

College-bound students who believe that studying with people of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds is important are bound to find college campuses much different in the coming decade.