“The trouble with diversity … is not just that it won’t solve the problem of economic inequality. It’s that it makes it hard for us to even see the problem.”
Lisa Hickey had no sooner published her rant on the inequality of the educational system, when someone sent us this article on GOOD magazine: “Ivy League Fooled: How America’s Top Colleges Avoid Real Diversity.”
My point in my article, “Harvard, Learn to Share” is that the way our current educational system stands, it is blatantly unfair:
It is unfair by race. It is unfair by socioeconomic class. It is unfair by gender. It is unfair by the amount of innate intelligence a child is born with. The current educational system unfairly dictates how much you will earn the rest of your life, whether you’ve got a shot at getting out of poverty, or whether you’re going to continue being rich. It starts at a the base level, at a small school sprouting up from the ground in Alabama to a 6th grade science lab in Harlem with no lab equipment. It starts with the way some school systems get money, and some don’t. Some kids get to go to private schools who openly flaunt the number of graduates that get into the Ivy’s. I don’t need a degree from your university to understand that, in this country, it is the luck of the draw that allows a child to go to attend a good school system or not. And try as I might to see how this is “justice for all,” I simply cannot see it as anything but unfair.
And – guess what. As this article says explains – even while schools like Harvard are touting their diversity – they are neglecting an important fact. That they are taking those who are wealthy and diverse, not those who have gotten an unfair “luck of the draw” at all:
“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.”
“Call it the Ivy League’s dirty little secret: While America’s most elite colleges do in fact make it a point to promote ethnic diversity on their campuses, a lot of them do so by admitting hugely disproportionate numbers of wealthy immigrants and their children rather than black students with deep roots—and troubled histories—in the United States…Data shows that African immigrants, Nigerians in particular, are far wealthier and more highly educated than many Americans of any race.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, “Emails and phone calls to Brown, Yale, and Princeton requesting interviews about their admissions processes went unanswered.”
Because, apparently, there are quite a few people who “don’t want to talk about race”, nor about socioeconomic disparity when it comes to educational opportunities.
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photo by mulad / flickr
Read Lisa Hickey’s original rant on the subject:
Something to bear in mind when you look at the race/ethnicity data from any college or university is that it is usually the percentage of “those who specified a category.” There is in fact a growing percentage of students who either refuse to specify, check more than one box, or write in something else. I know of at least one 4-year university where the second biggest group after “white” is “did not answer.” That fact is conveniently left out of the school brochures celebrating the school’s diverse student body. Before evaluating the “students of color” percentages, be sure to find… Read more »