At a time when many colleges and many students strive for a diverse student body, some schools are more diverse than others. In fact when you view the freshman profiles for schools they break out their incoming class and highlight their diversity statistics.
On the flip side, lets highlight the top 50 schools that are predominately white.
I don’t have the data for all top 50, but based on 2014 IPEDS data here are the Universities with large percentage of White Undergrad Students
Tulane: 71%
Notre Dame: 70%
Michigan 62%
Vanderbilt: 58%
Tufts: 57%
WashU: 55%
GeorgiaTech: 52%
NorthWestern: 52%
Rochester: 51%
Here are the ones with lowest White Undergrad Population
UCLA, Berkeley, Caltech: 28%
USC, CMU: 36%
MIT: 37%
Stanford, Rice: 38%
Columbia: 39%
Cornell: 42%
Brown: 43%
UPenn, Princeton, UChicago, Johns Hopkins: 45%
Yale: 47%
Harvard, Duke: 48%
UC Irvine and UC Davis are only like 15% white students, I don’t know if I’d call them diverse exactly, they are both over 50% Asian, UCSD too.
Non-Hispanic whites make up 63% of the US population.
I think it is more useful to determine how the college’s population differs from the population of the state where it is located, or more popular states it draws from. ‘White’ also encompasses some diversity too ; Many Hispanics and all Middle Easterners and North Africans are considered ‘white’
Caucasian usually specifies non Hispanic or Hispanic.
Just flip this list:
Lets be honest here. When the word “diversity” is mentioned by school administrators, they are mostly referring to the number of African Americans enrolled. I would imagine all of the top 50 schools are underrepresented in this area.
It seems to me that schools count everyone except non-Hispanic whites as “Persons of Color”.
I would say in the world of college admissions everything is relative. The peer schools are competing for a somewhat similar pool of students with some variation for location.
Outside the public universities and religious schools, why is there such a wide variation in diversity (or lack of it) between highly selective schools?
Actually in college admissions it is under-represented minorities is the group they are talking about. That includes black, hispanic and native american students.
The percentage of whites has actually risen at some UCs over the last few years, due to changes in admissions policies. The US Dept. of Education’s College Navigator website (which has data for Fall 2015) lists the current (Fall 2015) percentage of whites at these schools as follows: UCI 15%, UCSD 21%, UCD 28%. So whites are clearly a minority at all three schools, though “like 15% white” is only realistic for UCI.
Asian (as in “Asian-American”): UCI 37%, UCSD 37%, UCD 32%. However, these schools also have a lot of “non-resident alien” (as in “International”) students: UCI: 16%, UCD: 11%, UCSD: 17%. Also some people in the “2 or More” or “Unknown” categories: UCI: 5%, UCSD: 7%; UCD: 6%. It seems likely that most Internationals are from Asian countries, and that many people in the “2 or more” or “Unknown” categories might be perceived as “Asian”. And in that case, it seems possible that UCI and UCSD are 50%+ Asian or Asian-American, though UCD is probably in the 40-50% range.
The “whitest” school in the UC system is Cal Poly: 57% White, 16% Hispanic/Latino, 12% Asian, 2% International, 12% “2 or more”/“Unknown”. OK, Cal Poly isn’t actually a UC school, but in practice it functions like one. Their applicant pool probably overlaps more with UCD and UCSB than with any other Cal State.
Even nationally-known private schools tend to have some regional tendencies in student interest, despite often making efforts to recruit students from other regions. Additionally, some majors may be more or less popular with white students versus others, and colleges known for specific majors or types of majors may see their ethnic mix affected by such student interest.
What about Tulane, don’t they have students coming from the most geographic distance of most any school? Plus I believe they count their part time night students in the School of Continuing Studies in their diversity statistics? Shouldn’t Tulane’s number of diverse students be higher and white students lower? (Seemingly they are the least diverse of all highly selective schools?)
For diversity reasons, some schools make much more of an effort to outreach toward qualified students with lower incomes, racial minorities, and others who would never think of applying to an elite college because no one they have ever known has gone to college, etc.
But it is very expensive to do this, especially because a huge number of these students can’t pay a dime toward tuition. It is much better for your University bottom line to just keep maximizing your full pay students, and using your financial aid pot to provide “merit” scholarships to well-off kids who might otherwise choose a different school but for a $6000 difference in tuition.
Stanford and Columbia and Amherst and Vassar are on one end of the spectrum, and make major efforts to attract and retain lower income and minority applications. Wash U and Notre Dame and Washington and Lee and Colgate are on the other end of the spectrum, and make very little effort in this area.
CPSLO is the most selective CSU, probably roughly comparable to UCI in admission selectivity (but with variation by major, like other CSUs and UCs), but the relative weightings of various application components differs, as does the admissions procedure. Like other CSUs, its mix of majors skews much more toward pre-professional majors (versus liberal arts majors) than UCs typically do. CPSLO students in majors other than physics rarely go on the PhD programs.
I have a theory about Cal Poly SLO’s applicant pool- my daughter has an Indian friend with first generation parents. He’s looking at engineering so I suggested CP SLO, his parents don’t know much about the school and are not in favor of him applying there. They want him at UCLA or UCB, UCSD or UCI/USD as back ups. Because it’s more of a regional school they just aren’t very familiar with it and it doesn’t have enough cache for them. I would bet CO SLO us just not getting the same percentage of Asian applicants as the upper UC’s.
@hebegebe wrote ‘It seems to me that schools count everyone except non-Hispanic whites as “Persons of Color”.’
That sounds true to me, from the visits we have made to colleges. We toured Bryn Mawr twice in consecutive Octobers, and it ‘looked’ more than 36% white. U of Chicago looked more than 45% white. Anecdotal, I admit. And we have not toured any Ivies, but I wonder if looks like whites are in the minority there.
Schools know it is good PR to have a more diverse student body, and these ratios are included in guides like Princeton’s. I am not arguing against diversity. But what about other ways to look at diversity might be using parental income, or level of parents’ education?
Parental income/wealth and education level are much less visible than race/ethnicity, so it should not be hard to see why many people think of the latter when the topic of “diversity” comes up, even though the former are huge when it comes to the kids’ educational opportunities.
Also, from the college point of view, diversifying on parental income/wealth is expensive on the financial aid budget. 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). Note that they can target a specific SES mix without being need-aware for individual applicants by adjusting their admission criteria to favor those aspects which high SES applicants are more likely to do well in.