The administration has launched a multiyear racial and socioeconomic diversity plan, but a lot of students aren’t pleased.
Michigan’s admission policies work against SES diversity, such as by considering legacy status.
On race and ethnicity, the Midwest region does tend to have high levels of racial segregation.
@ucbalumnus , please explain what you mean by racial segregation in the midwest vs other regions, and what does that have to do with Michigan?
Michigan does not consider race, by law, in admissions. Like Cal, it has resulted in a far greater percentage of Asian origin domestic students than in the general population of student age. Also somewhat more recently, Michigan split the AA/Black group into AA/Black and Mixed Race, then once again into AA/Black, URM Mixed Race, and ORM Mixed Race. Comparisons are much more difficult, and also essentially meaningless because of the dissimilarity and self-identification of categories.
At Michigan at least, the U has several new initiatives to help poorer Michigan residents of exceptional academic merit from low quality school districts succeed. Too many students from lower SES failed to graduate. Students enter Michigan during the second semester of their senior HS year, and stay over the summer, and have intense remedial education to prepare them for Freshman classes. That is not what they are referring to in the article, it is more of a pilot program.
Yes, and that’s mentioned prominently in the article.
Not much of an article. Very few details and little discussion around admission policies, etc. High admission standards, high cost, and a high % of OOS students (that can afford to attend UM), play a role.
Little to no discussion around the difficulty of hiring URM faculty.
@TooOld4School I assume UCB meant that Michigan’s black population is concentrated in a few counties (see the below link), that tend to have poor school systems.
https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/michigan/black-population-percentage#map
Michigan actually has a bit higher % of Hispanic undergraduate students, than the state. It also has a lower % of white students, than the state. The difference is made up by Asian students (13%, compare to the state population of 3%).
Since race is not a consideration in admissions, and the new HAIL program has essentially removed cost barriers, the problem remains that many urban school districts in Michigan by and large do not produce the quality of students that would attend Michigan.
The students want a band-aid of reducing admission standards, but those lower quality and less prepared students just fail more often. Even with the pilot program I mentioned, the problem is way out of scope for a single university to do much about. Solutions that would work involve major political change from the status quo, which many urban AA voters have been unwilling or unable to consider. At least a few kids are being helped with the plot program.
Some time ago there was a coop program at Focus:HOPE in Detroit which trained bright students to become skilled trades at auto suppliers and at the Big 3, and many moved on to become engineers at UM-Dearborn and UM-Ann Arbor. That lifted a lot of families out of poverty.
…and when they do get in, they might not feel as welcome and supported as they’d like:
(from the article)
Or, you know, Michigan doesn’t recruit at those schools. Or students at those schools simply don’t know to apply to Michigan as they don’t know about the financial aid programs.
It’s a considerable leap to say that these schools don’t produce “the quality of student that would attend Michigan.”
Personally, I think most of U of M’s outreach attempts are a joke. They have an extremely high SES student body and could certainly change that if they truly wanted diversity. They haven’t, so IMO, they don’t.
One of my kiddo’s best friends at UMich is a black dude from inner city Detroit. This guy has stellar grades, and is a terrific kid who is a talented writer. UMich IS a public State University. I don’t have a problem with its student body looking a little more like the population of state it’s in. My kid was recruited by UMich from a very poor, very rural district. Maybe they’ve improved a bit in recent years?
Meh…my kid and her friend from Detroit are pretty happy at UMich. They’ve both had super positive experiences. No complaints.
If you receive 55000 apps for 6000 seats and your primary driver is unweighted gpa and standardized tests scores I imagine you would have a student body that looks pretty much like what you see in a state like Michigan. Until very recently there was no aid for international students and very little aid for OSS kids.
Like every selective university I am sure UofM would like more diversity but is that mission more essential than the current mission of educating the tippy top kids in the state and other kids from other places who think it is worth the $$ is an entirely different proposition especially for a public school which tends to reflect that state’s population. UofM has long done outreach into areas of Michigan that are low SES and met need for Michigan students. I am sure there are studies that show the SES and racial diversity numbers at peer institutions and my guess is UofM is not an outlier.
The article does say that the median income of the students’ families is the highest of the most selective public universities.
And that should be no surprise - typically high SES generates higher GPA and test scores. If anything, in Michigan the GPA and test scores have risen cumulatively higher than even ten years ago. Michigan is somewhere in the vicinity of 80% white/Caucasian but within that there is great income disparity. The percent of population at poverty level is a little bit higher than the national average. It is rather silly, in my opinion, to have some sort of unwritten “national” standard for what levels of socio-economic or racial diversity universities should have - the country is not uniformly distributed in SES or ethnicity and it’s somewhat a yawn for me that students all bright enough to be at UofM can’t grasp some of this basic information and even funnier that the article starts out about 2 Californians complaining about a Michigan public university.
This is a tough one.
One of the most interesting things I’ve heard on this topic came from the arguments UT/Austin made in the Fisher SCOTUS cases in support of their race-based AA plan (which would be illegal in Michigan under state law).
UT argued that their SES-based AA policies resulted (doh!) in them enrolling very poor URM students and that those students often struggled once they enrolled. UT’s goal in using race rather than SES was to be able to enroll more middle and upper class URM sudents. In their words, the children of successful black professionals from Dallas.
I totally understand where UT was coming from on this as a practical matter. But also recognize that that version of AA is one that a lot of people strongly object to – does Malia Obama (extreme example I know) really deserve an admissions break? That’s why voters (rightly or wrongly) banned UM from using those kind of preferences.
Given the high SES student body that comes from high prices, lots of OOS enrollment and very selective admissions, the deck is stacked against UM making big incremental gains in diversity. And from an overall societal view, it is probably more important to focus on getting more URM kids into (and more importantly out of) into all kinds of colleges and not focus so much on the elite tip of the iceberg.
For the elite iceberg tip, I wonder if the elite state U’s are just too hamstrung financially and politically to really do this job. It seems to be easier for an elite private like Yale (more money and more legal freedom) to serve the Ben Carsons. Also easier for non-elite publics to have more diversity – MSU is 8% AA as compared to 4% at UM.
If nationally we want to make gains on educational parity across SES and ethnicity, it’s better done at the K-12 level than wringing our hands about colleges and universities where K-12 education achievement parity IS the threshold.
Here is a comparison:
(data from https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator )
(LEG = largest racial/ethnic group)
% Pell % LEG School
35 29 California - Los Angeles
31 35 California - Berkeley
30 56 Florida
25 44 Texas - Austin
24 42 Washington - Seattle
23 71 Georgia
22 63 North Carolina - Chapel Hill
21 71 Ohio State - Main
20 48 Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
20 68 Minnesota - Twin Cities
17 50 Georgia Tech
16 68 Penn State - Main
15 61 Michigan - Ann Arbor
14 75 Wisconsin - Madison
13 61 Virginia
Based on UCB’s numbers, UW-Madison and UVa aren’t any better than Michigan.
The top 3 schools, all use holistic admissions, can’t consider race in admissions, are based in states with a large population (which means they can recruit from a larger in-state pool of high performing/low SES students), and offer very good merit/need based aid to low SES students.
White (non-international) students are substantially underrepresented at Michigan relative to state demographics, and slightly underrepresented relative to national demographics. If ‘diversity’ aims to capture roughly the ratios in the source population, then the main problem is the imbalance between Asians (ORM) and black (URM).
The bigger issue at Michigan and some other state universities is that middle and lower income students (Pell) appear to have limited opportunities.
Limited opportunities in what way? Seems like the outcome is different, but the opportunity is the same. Esp as it relates to in state kids, the FA is very generous.
In Wisconsin they found only a very real handful of black HS grads (approx 108) in the state were even remotely qualified for UW. https://apir.wisc.edu/admissions/2011_Pipeline_Update.pdf