Ivy League Fooled: How America's Top Colleges Avoid Real Diversity

Cord Jefferson:

Back in March, as colleges began to herald their newly admitted classes for PR purposes, the Ivy League schools got to patting themselves on the back.

The Harvard Gazette bragged that Harvard's newest batch of accepted students included record numbers of blacks and Latinos. Brown said its admitted class was "the most racially ... diverse" in the school's centuries-long history. Dartmouth shared actual percentages, declaring that a full 44 percent of its newest class was composed of students of color. Coincidentally, that was the same percentage of minorities in Penn's freshman class.

Numbers like these might lead someone to believe that diversity is no longer an issue at America's most elite colleges. Like everyone else, students of color have long strived to make it to the Ivy League, where the education and connections can set a person up for life. Now, evidently, huge numbers of minorities are getting their chance. When nearly half of an Ivy League school's accepted class is made up of people of color--America as a whole is only 47 percent non-white (PDF)--aren't we nearing perfect equality? If only.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 3, 2011 4:09 AM
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