the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation released a report on diversity at the nation’s 91 most competitive colleges as defined by Barron’s, which compiles information on higher education. The Cooke report found that fewer than one in 25 students at these schools came from families in the country’s lowest socioeconomic quartile, while nearly three in four came from families in the top quartile.
“It’s outrageous,” Harold Levy, the foundation’s executive director, said when we discussed the issue recently. “What it says to me is that the working class is history at these schools, the middle class is on its way out the door and the upper class is dominating. And that’s not what the American dream is about.”
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Elite colleges have lately been taking a harder look at socioeconomic diversity and how to achieve it, for several reasons. It’s their response to a broader public discussion about growing income inequality and insufficient opportunity to climb the economic ladder.
It’s also a preparation for any Supreme Court decision that instructs colleges not to give preferential consideration to applicants based on race. The court is set to rule imminently on Fisher v. University of Texas, which challenges such affirmative-action policies.
Levy said that highly selective schools “need to collectively have a strategy to avoid going back to the ’50s, when they were white male enclaves.”
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The socioeconomic diversity at elite colleges is hardly the most vital concern about higher education. These colleges serve a small fraction of the country’s students.
But that diversity is important nonetheless. It’s a mirror of our values — in particular, of how well we own up to stacked decks and how willing we are to make adjustments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/opinion/sunday/how-and-why-you-diversify-colleges.html
The article was interesting though it didn't discuss a lot that will be new to anyone who hangs out here. But the comments...I wasn't expecting that much anger. Especially as the article is about efforts to achieve socioeconomic diversity, not race based diversity.
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