<p>Excellent trip report Papa Chicken. Your observations were nearly identical to ours when we visited Davidson last year for Jr day. DW and I loved the school, but DS wasn't too thrilled. He felt it was too small for his tastes. I would add that the surrounding town of Davidson was very nice. Had a Mayberry type of feel. Wouldn't have been surprised at all to see Sheriff Andy come strolling down the sidewalk. Lots of nice shops nearby and Charlotte was very close for big city entertainment. On the diversity issue, we noticed it as well but it didn't distract us from the overall feel of the school. The black girl on the student panel discussed the issue head on. Said she wished there were more blacks at the school but also felt very accepted and comfortable at the school. My periodontist is a black graduate of Davidson and he loved the school. He also reiterated that Davidson grads do well getting into grad schools, medical schools, etc. My biggest complaint was it seemed a bit to quite and sleepy. Maybe it was the day we visited, I don't know. Overall, I found the school to be very very nice.</p>
<p>stepping squarely into the line of fire.....</p>
<p>Swarthmore class of 09 = 26 African Americans or 6.7% of the class (102 total or 7.0% for the entire degree-seeking enrollment)....both from the latest CDS.</p>
<p>vs Davidson class of '09 = 32 African Americans, or 7.0% of the class (100 or 5.9% of the entire degree-seeking enrollment).</p>
<p>Pretty close....</p>
<p>i can see the Swarthmore commercial coming any minute.</p>
<p>Like a broken clock.</p>
<p>Mini: You did not originally say the percentage of freshmen. You refered to the overall student body.</p>
<p>It is true that 7% of Davidson's freshmen this fall were Af Am compared to 6.7% at Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Some of the underlying numbers reveal that Swarthmore has a great deal of trouble yielding African Americans, especially Af Am males. For the current fall class, Swarthmore sent 12% of its acceptance letters to Af Am students, but yielded just 6.7% of the freshman class. </p>
<p>The struggle to yield Af Am males is apparent in the breakdown of Swat's Af Am students: 64 female, 38 male. Davidson has the opposite breakdown with more Af Am males than Af Am females. My guess is that the athletic scholarships and the presence of a Div I football program may be factors.</p>
<p>Swarthmore has actually seen its Af Am enrollment decline by a couple of percentage points in the last five years...all related to yield difficulties. There are two issues: First, Swarthmore's reputation as one of the hardest schools in the country is probably not the most effective pitch in that segment. Second, the competition for Af Am students that Swarthmore accepts is intense -- both from above (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and from the increasing number of schools using merit aid (either explicitly or implictly such as Questbridge) as a diversity recruiting tool. I don't see an easy answer. I can't really suggest that they send more than 12% of their acceptances to Af Am students or increase their Af Am acceptance rate of 46%. I don't think Swarthmore should abandon its need-based aid policy, although they certainly have the money to win merit aid battles should they ever go that route.</p>
<p>I think you meant broken record. And yes, it was predictable. Signing out of this thread as it gets hijacked.</p>
<p>I posted this in the Davidson forum, thought it would be good to include it in the trip report, as my opinion morphed as I visited & looked harder at the data (and more data became available coincident to my curiousity). And I wanted to be fair & to make sure prospective Davidson applicants understand my change in course. Bottom line, the school has moved more than the previously available numbers suggested & the trends looks favorable, signalling at least to me that they are doing something about the recruitment issue, although they haven't gone public & said such.......</p>
<p>...............</p>
<p>Yet one more look </p>
<hr>
<p>I have learned much in the last month or two, so thank you all. Mattmom, I hope you appreciate my attempt below to better articulate my diversity meter as you so coined, with my latest learning.</p>
<p>After hearing you and others, as well as visiting Davidson, I am 100% convinced that Davidson is committed to making diversity work, and that commitment is currently working for the student community now at Davidson. I also now have a deeper appreciation for Davidsons strive for excellence in all areas, an example as voiced by Davidson leaders...best in academics, best in athletics.</p>
<p>Attendant with Davidsons excellence, I have high expectations in all categories of institutional achievement, and I would expect Davidson to strive for best in class by all measures relative to their peer group. Conveniently, Davidsons IR site lists peer institutions (<a href="http://www2.davidson.edu/administration/adm/ir/ir_peers.asp%5B/url%5D">http://www2.davidson.edu/administration/adm/ir/ir_peers.asp</a>) with which I can compare & contrast how those peers have made institutional commitments to diversity. </p>
<p>I am not looking at commitment for making diversity work with the culture of the school; I now firmly believe Davidson is on the mark here. I am looking at what Ill call the next stage, making that commitment known to the outside community, especially to people like me poised to make a $160,000 investment. I have noticed that highly esteemed institutions in general do make their intensions known, and IMO that is a good thing. I could wax on about why, but lets just say that I see great organizational benefits to an open-book policy where goals are made known to stakeholders and results are openly displayed.</p>
<p>With regard to diversity bench-marking, I observe two means with which colleges communicate with their outside stakeholders:
1. posting admissions and enrollment data with sufficient detail to enable someone to assess minority inclusion for a given time period (results openly displayed evidence.)
2. posting data analyses specific to minority trending in enrollment (further evidence of results displaying.)
3. conspicuous posting of minority recruitment efforts or goals, especially visible to the applying community (goals made known evidence.)</p>
<p>The most recent Common Data Set (CDS) being available to the public satisfies the first criterion, with data on minority group enrollment (CDS section B) for incoming freshmen and undergraduate student body, for the most recent fall enrollment. Trend analysis satisfying the second criterion is delivered in many forms and web locations (e.g., institutional research web site, admissions web site, or factbook), but qualities of good analyses always include specific tables or figures tracking various minority categories, with multiple years (i.e., >3 or 4) of data. Likewise, conspicuous display of minority recruiting efforts or goals (third criterion) comes in many forms, but the most-communicative institutions typically mention, for instance, a connection to Questbridge or have a statement of minority recruitment commitment in the admissions web page.</p>
<p>Note that I spent limited time doing this subjective and not-so-scientific survey.</p>
<p>Here is how Davidsons peer institutions stacked up on satisfying these three criteria (Y or N for yes or no):</p>
<p>Category
1 / 2 / 3 / COLLEGE
Y / Y / N / Bates
Y / N / Y / Bowdoin
Y / N / Y / Carleton
N / N / N / Claremont M
N / N / Y / Colgate
Y / Y / N / Furman
Y / N / N / Grinnel
Y / Y / Y / Hamilton
Y / Y / N / Haverford
Y / N / Y / Middlebury
Y / Y / N / Oberlin
Y / N / N / Rhodes
N / N / N / Sewanee
Y / Y / Y / Swarthmore
N / Y / N / Vassar
Y / Y / N / W&L
N / N / Y / Wesleyan
Y / Y / Y / Williams</p>
<p>So, the best by this yardstick have yeses in all categories, namely Hamilton, Swarthmore, & Williams (note, Swarthmore & Williams are especially prolific in their diversity commitment displays.) On the other end, Claremont & Sewanee stick out as the least communicative of the peer institutions. One could argue about the importance of each category, but my opinion is that displaying minority trends and demonstrating a recruitment commitment are more important in communicating commitment with outside constituencies than providing base data for the recent year (i.e., the CDS).</p>
<p>With Davidsons recent updating of their IR web site information, the latest CDS is now available, and one of the posted FactFile reports specifically tracks minority enrollment trends. Hence, both criteria 1 and 2 are satisfied. However, I was unable to find any conspicuous statement of recruiting efforts or goals. So, by the yardstick above, Davidson would score Y-Y-N. (BTW, if I had done this a month or two ago, the score would have been N-N-N, alongside Claremont & Sewanee.)</p>
<p>So the above is a long-winded way to conclude that IMHO, Davidson still has some room to excel if being best in class in the diversity category is important to them. Conspicuous display of Davidsons minority recruitment goals or means/progress of attaining those goals would satisfy being best in class. There is undoubtedly much more to this story, possibly related to the apparent turnover of admissions leadership in recent years or the re-establishment of stronger IR, I just dont know. Davidson most definitely has a different heritage with different culture than many other peer institutions. Nevertheless, being best in class as a national force still means to me that Davidson should make their diversity commitment known, as so many other fine institutions have done.</p>
<p>Hey Papa Chicken,
I was wondering how this article (the timing couldn't be better) might affect Wesleyan's diversity meter:
<a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/leoblog/archives/060228/candor_on_campus.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/leoblog/archives/060228/candor_on_campus.htm</a></p>
<p>
[quote]
The struggle to yield Af Am males is apparent in the breakdown of Swat's Af Am students: 64 female, 38 male. Davidson has the opposite breakdown with more Af Am males than Af Am females. My guess is that the athletic scholarships and the presence of a Div I football program may be factors.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>According to the NCAA (most recent data is from Fall 2003-04), Davidson has very few recruited athletes who are African American. That particular year, there were no African American scholarship players on the football team. Perhaps things have changed in the past two years.</p>
<p>Hoedown:</p>
<p>My point was that a college of 1700 students with a Division I football program is probably more likely to attract black males (as opposed to black females) than a college with no football. It's not an issue of scholarship slots as much as campus culture.</p>
<p>It's actually interesting. At academically strong LACs, African Americans tend to be less likely to be on sports teams than white students. These schools focus the bulk of their athletic recruiting at prep schools and therefore on white athletes.</p>
<p>jw-- interesting & timely article. On my admittedly arbitrary diversity meter, the article's info fits into category 3, where I had seen evidence of Wesleyan's overall goals or intensions on the Wesleyan web, although for whatever reason, Wesleyan chooses not to publish statistics on the minority share (via a Wesleyan posted CDS) or trends. In the grand scheme, a school addressing the minority recruiting issue publicly, willing to talk about it with their intensions & shortcomings, goes a long way in my book in understanding that diversity in itself is an important value for the institution. So, even though Wesleyan gets only one Yes in my overly simplistic rating, it is a very important Yes.....one which Davidson doesn't have to my inspection. Guess I'm just on my one-man campaign to persuade Davidson to step to the plate & declare the recruiting element of diversity as an important goal....by the numbers, they seem to be acting that way, but unlike Wesleyan, public discussion doesn't (yet) back up their apparent intent. I also wouldn't have such lofty expectations if Davidson was not the exemplary institution that it is.</p>
<p>one other Davidson tidbit that I forgot to include in the OP....when asked about rooming satisfaction, our tour guide noted that roomates are coupled by arranging good matches from Myers-Briggs personality tests. Although I have never delved much into the roomate match subject, this sounded like a rationale approach to me, & seemed a bit more progressive than what I presume many other schools do...perhaps nothing or simple interest matching.</p>
<p>"According to the NCAA (most recent data is from Fall 2003-04), Davidson has very few recruited athletes who are African American. That particular year, there were no African American scholarship players on the football team. Perhaps things have changed in the past two years."</p>
<p>At Williams, the rate of African-American students playing ANY varsity sport is less than half that of white students.</p>
<p>Point of clarification.
Davidson is Division I-A in everything but football.
They are in Division I-AA in football, in the Pioneer League. Davidson does not award any football scholarships to anybody (though other Division I-AA schools in other leagues do, of course).<br>
Of the 79 men on the football roster this past season, 14 were African-American.
The Cats posted a disappointing 4-6 record this season. Hope springs eternal in hoops, however. Though they are coming into this weekend's Southern Conference tournament seeded third, they are still the class of the league in talent. They got very sloppy and turnover-prone toward the end of the regular season. They have 7 seniors on the roster (4 starters, I think). Hopefully, the prospect of every game being their last will elevate their game a bit, and bring them a ticket to the Dance.</p>
<p>Go 'Cats!. Minds, eyes, and hands on the ball.:)</p>