A Jewish friend commented recently that he was no longer going to donate to his alma mater, Columbia University.
“At one point, the Jewish population was almost half, but now because of unspoken quotas for racial diversity, it’s down to 10%.”
“Wokeness infected my school,” he said, clearly angry.
For starters, my friend’s numbers were wrong. My fellow Jews make up 22% of Columbia’s student body — not 10%.
While most Jews aren’t following my friend’s lead, grievances and claims of bias like his have increased.
Many Asians also believe they’re being shut out of Ivy League schools, specifically Harvard, and have taken their case to the Supreme Court. Their view is that their advances are unfairly being reversed to make room for Black people, Latinos, and others — the result of society’s growing “wokeness” and demand that dark-skinned people be given opportunities after centuries of enslavement and discrimination.
The problem is people like my friend and the Asian plaintiffs miss the bigger picture — that affirmative action policies lead to more racially and ethnically mixed schools, which in turn lead to a more advanced, civil, and ultimately just world.
One group’s complaining that another group is getting preferential treatment just slows our progress.
Because Jews and Asians statistically do well on standardized tests, we still ought to address their decline in Ivy admissions. All while Harvard has added more subjective considerations for admission such as courage, likability, and kindness to their admission process.
An important aside: Growing up lower income myself, and attending public city schools while working several jobs, my SAT results were dismal on the English section. According to the test, I wouldn’t have the aptitude to be a lawyer or writer. Oops. Now I’m both.
I’d like to think my own experience shows that test scores are far from the only predictor of success. Merit comes in many forms.
How We Got Here
Nearly 100 years ago, places like Columbia, Harvard and Yale instituted an anti-Semitic policy of restricting the number of Jews who would be admitted, ensuring the schools didn’t have too many Jews. Harvard’s cap was 15%.
Dartmouth went so far as to have discussions about what types of Jews they would let in, opting for predominantly wealthy. While this was a step up from when these schools denied all Jews access, the quotas were based on pervasive anti-Jewish sentiments.
My friend was sort of right. The percentage of Jews at some Ivy Leagues has dropped over time. Jews made up over one-third of the student body at Columbia 50 years ago; today, it’s about one-fifth.
But too many of us exaggerate or twist statistics to defend a particular world view. What my friend left out is that total enrollment of all students in Ivy Leagues is significantly higher than it was many decades ago. The number of Jews in most Ivy League schools remains much higher than it was in the 1920s, even if the percentage of total enrollment is less.
In the 1970s, when Columbia was affordable and let in largely people from New York, which has the largest Jewish population in the U.S., Jews were about 40% of the student populations of Columbia and a couple other Ivy schools. Today Columbia has students from all over America, and in fact the world, so of course student enrollment of New York Jews would decline.
Even with those broad changes in student enrollment, the current Jewish population of Columbia is 22.3%. That’s 1,500 students of the 6,716 undergraduates. The Jewish population of America is about 2%. That Columbia admitted more people of color and people from almost every state and many countries didn’t mean Jews were no longer welcome.
At Harvard, the 2023 total undergraduate student enrollment is about 9,500, out of over 60,000 applicants who vied for the class of 2026.
So when people jump to blame wokeness for changes in enrollment percentages at Ivy Leagues, they forget to factor in that there are tens of thousands of more applicants from around the entire world, and there way more students, compared to decades ago.
It’s also true that many Jews and Asians, communities that have generally established a high level of success and education in America, don’t seek the elite status of an Ivy League like they used to. They aren’t collectively worried they need the Harvard degree to make it.
Wait? You mean their admission to Ivy League schools in the past helped catapult them to a better place in America? That’s sort of the point here.
Anyway, fewer Jewish and Asian students apply to these schools now because there’s less family pressure to climb the American ladder. I didn’t even bring it up with my kids despite raising two high school valedictorians.
Honestly, as an Ohio State Buckeye state school graduate myself, I just made it clear to my kids I wasn’t paying for our rival, the University of Xichigan. The X wasn’t a typo. We Buckeyes try to avoid use of the letter “M”… but I digress.
“We don’t need to be so worried… if 15% of Yale College was Jewish, and we make up 2 percent of the population… then I’m not troubled by these kinds of numbers,” said Dan Oren, author of “Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale.”
So even before we explore why a racially and ethnic diverse student body is important, it’s a threshold to understand that groups like Jews and Asians aren’t nosediving into economic marginalization. That simply is false and allowing that narrative to pit ethnic minorities against each other isn’t good for racial progress.
Nearly 20% of the University of Florida’s student body is Jewish. The University of Maryland 20%. Michigan, 16%. Boston University, 23%. NYU, 12%. Tulane, 42%. Washington University in St. Louis, 26%. George Washington University, 10%.
Asians make up huge percentages of the student bodies of great schools like Georgia Tech, University of California, Berkley, University of Texas, Duke and University of Maryland.
There aren’t large swaths of Jewish and Asian students struggling to get a good education and make it in this world, Ivy Leagues or not. People tell those fibs not because they’re truly concerned that Jews and Asians are suffering to get into good schools. It’s because they don’t fully support Black people having the same access and opportunities. Consciously or not.
Diverse Means Healthy
Numbers of Jews and Asians at Ivy League schools aside, what diversity naysayers fail to understand is that racially and ethnically mixed student bodies are critical for our society to progress for many reasons.
· A diverse student body provides all students with a much more robust education and experience. It’s an opportunity for everyone to learn more and hear a wider array of ideas.
· Racially diverse student bodies promote critical thinking — a skillset sadly on the steep decline nowadays.
· Diverse student bodies help raise generations of young adults on how to respect and love our vast differences so when they enter the post-college real world, they’ve learned how to communicate with each other. And to be well-prepared to appreciate what each of us brings to the table. Maybe even creating more seats at those tables.
· Admitting people who traditionally have been underrepresented in Ivy League and other great schools is critical to closing the sickeningly wide racial economic gap in this country. We aren’t short on brilliant Black people, so admitting more of them as one means of correcting the past makes common sense. We can’t simultaneously complain about society’s racially related ills but be unwilling to radically change how we’ve operated when it comes to race.
Simply put, diversity in education promotes a healthier society. One where all of us will reap the benefits.
So let’s stop criticizing efforts to diversify by pitting groups against each other because it only deepens our divide. Instead, let’s promote the idea that not just some of us ought to have an opportunity to excel.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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