Elite universities have gone overboard in reducing White
admissions to expand those of People of Color and international applicants.
When the data for the top 20 national universities and top
10 liberal arts colleges become available at the end of March, I’ll post the
percentages of admissions by race and ethnicity and compare them with the
national percentages of the United States.
Some schools provide only partial or no information on the racial/ethnic
composition of their admissions.
In this post I’ll describe the transformation of my alma
mater, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). The story is similar for about half of the top
20 universities.
I attended WUSTL during 1958-1962. In 1958, the school was a “streetcar
college.” Only about 10% of the students
were campus residents; the other 90% commuted to class. People of Color were few and far
between. I do not recall seeing a single
Black or Hispanic in my three years in Engineering school.
During my undergraduate years, WUSTL embarked on a dorm
building program to broaden its student body.
Within several decades, it developed into a regional university for the
Midwest, with students coming from states between the Appalachian and Rocky
Mountains. Several decades later, it
became a national university, competing for a national ranking in the teens,
right after the Ivies, MIT, and Stanford.
It also established cooperative agreements with universities around the
world in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
During 1960-2020, the United States underwent a steady
demographic change. White residents declined
in successive decades from 85% of the U.S. population in 1960, to 84%, 80%,
76%, 69%, 64%, to an estimated 60% in 2020.
Let’s compare national racial/ethnic percentages with WUSTL admissions
for the class of 2023.
White Asian
Black Hispanic Misc
Intern’l
USA
60% 6 13 19 3
WUSTL 39%
20 15 13 5 8
Two numbers stand out.
One is the huge under-admission of Whites relative to their share of the
national population. The other is the
over-admission of Asians.
There may be several reasons for these disparities. First, WUSTL may be trying to avoid getting
caught in the Harvard problem, which is being sued for a purported quota on
Asian applicants. Second, Asians are
counted as “People of Color,” which dramatically enhances Diversity among admitted
undergraduate students.
Two other factors reduce available slots for middle- and upper-middle-income
White applicants. Every elite university
has embarked on a campaign to enroll first-generation low-income (FLI)
students, some of whom are White. Also, filling
out athletic teams (swimming and diving, tennis, water polo, etc.) consumes
White slots. Some athletes may be top
students, but some are not. Although WUSTL
is a Division III school, it still needs to fill out its intercollegiate sports
teams with good athletes to be competitive in its conference.
These factors leave fewer slots for non-athletic upper-middle-class Whites. No wonder some White parents take desperate
measures to get a slot.
To present an image of greater fairness in admissions, six
of the top 10 universities have announced that they will no longer give preference
to legacies (family members who attended the specific university) and some have
declared that donors will no longer receive preference for their children.
N’est-ce pas? Maybe
so, maybe not. University officials will
doubtless claim that privacy precludes disclosing the names of donors whose
children have been accepted or rejected for admission. Universities are all for accountability and
transparency, but not when their gifts are at stake. University faculty are quick to denounce
inequality, except when it refers to their own top-ranked school.
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