Desperately Seeking Diversity
Stanford University will no longer charge tuition to students whose families’ make less than $100,000 a year. That’s good for diversity, but it’s not good enough.By Kai Stinchcombe
March 3, 2008
The Stanford University campus. (Photo courtesy Jawed Karim)
Here are some steps schools can take to ensure their classes are truly diverse:
Free enrichment programs for incoming students
Affirmative action policies are designed to help talented high school students who haven’t had the benefit of SAT-prep classes or Advanced Placement courses — or who have had to work a job or take care of younger siblings — to get into top a college or university. But the idea that we’ve done disadvantaged students a huge favor by simply getting them into college just doesn’t make sense. If a student doesn’t have the preparation many of his peers have had, a pat on the back and a ticket to Stanford is in many ways the last thing he needs. He still has less academic preparation than everyone else — and that sets him up to fail in classes, feel alienated from his peers, and to reinforce negative stereotypes in the process.
Robust affirmative action programs need to be coupled with efforts to make up the preparation gap. We need to both admit students and prepare them to succeed. One option would be a spring, summer, and fall program available to all incoming students that would allow them to cover some of the topics a high achieving college-prep high school would — AP math, intensive writing workshops, and U.S. and world history. It would hardly stretch the capacity of a top university to offer this to any admitted student who wants it, and it would do much to level the playing field among incoming students.
A comprehensive approach to diversity
Right now “diversity” is often a code word for “people of different colors.” That’s great, and it’s a very important component of diversity, but it’s not the whole story. Poor or rich, male or female, urban or rural, one or two parents, and white- or blue-collar family—all of these have a critical impact on how a child will score on standard admissions measures. Furthermore, these are all identities a school should want to be represented in the background of its students. If a school has racial diversity within a uniformly middle-class student body, it won’t have the same breadth of experience it should strive to achieve.
Anywhere a university values diversity—in admissions and financial aid, in academic support, in program review evaluations, in the creation of diversity programs or officers, in hiring decisions — it needs to take into account many different kinds of diversity. Gender, race, and class have historically been the biggest dividers in American society, but using diversity as a code word for one specific kind of diversity damages the broad concept’s chance to have a broad appeal.
Diversity in other areas of academic life
If we want to increase the benefit each student receives from the diversity of a school’s student body, we need to find ways to pull different people together — not by forcing interaction, but by providing enough pull to balance the natural push for people with common backgrounds to congregate together. What if each funded student group had to submit a “diversity plan” explaining how it is going to involve people of different backgrounds in their activities?
What if students applying for housing together got a small diversity bonus in housing draw priority if they brought together people from different backgrounds? What if academic departments set diversity goals for their major, or for big intro classes, and then thought about how to meet them?
More diverse role models and mentors
Much has been said about the role of a diverse faculty in attracting a diverse student body. The bottom line, though, is that the Ph.D. pipeline is almost singularly un-diverse among our country’s best institutions. We need to be working as hard to ensure faculty diversity, but if we can’t get there fast enough, we can’t let that be an excuse not to provide a set of culturally-cognate mentors in a university context. Stanford, for example, could draw from California’s politicians, business leaders, and media personalities — quite diverse group of people and certainly more diverse than the Stanford faculty.
Why not set up a “visiting leaders program” whose major purpose is to enhance the undergraduate experience — perhaps with both an open seminar and a personalized advising program where interested students can meet with a diverse group of people from the outside world? The idea that faculty are the primary source of mentorship is silly, and using that as an excuse for providing a heavily white-male set of student advisors is ludicrous.
Universities needn’t view these steps as a burden. Not only is ensuring diverse classes a moral imperative, it also draws the attention of donors, faculty members, and students who are eager to invest their time and money in an institution that prioritizes social justice. By embracing this mission, showing leadership, being holistic rather than half-hearted, and taking serious and creative steps, universities will find their other activities — education, fundraising, recruitment — enhanced by their extra effort.
Kai Stinchcombe is a political science Ph.D. student at Stanford University. He is a founder of the Roosevelt Institution.
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Comments
I like how in an article about diversity, we’re assuming the gender of the disadvantaged student is a “he.”
— ksteiger - Mar 3, 04:21 PM - #Drivel like this is why all PhD students should be seen and not heard.
— bob - Mar 8, 05:57 AM - #Another case of “dumbing down”, the truth of the matter is a political science Ph. D student today knows less then an 8th grader of 50 years ago !! Political science (science?) degrees are the same as journalism and education degrees, worthless.
— John - Mar 8, 06:58 AM - #Poor atempt at trying to fool all the people all the time. How did this article get passed by the editoral board? Surely colleges are still not teaching that diversity is good. The problems and failures of affirmative action and other socialistic attempts of social engineering have always failed. This student needs to be dropped from a program that he obviously can not handle. Stanford, like many other schools need to get rid of those aging “hippies” from the 60’s and find educators…whether they are white or not. I fear this writer(joke) is destined to become another “Che” loving bloviator in our schools or the so called mass media. He qualifies as he doesn’t know crap.
— sbias - Mar 9, 11:03 AM - #sbias do you have any real unbiased proof that educators are liberal or are you just spewing Conspiracy theories?
Why don’t you stop looking down on others. It makes you look like a Conservative Elitist
— Daniel - Mar 10, 01:37 PM - #I agree with this article. Thank you for writing a thought out, honest article about what is lacking in our universities in regards to diversity. We all say we support diversity, but when push comes to shove, we often just want whatever is easiest or most benefits ourselves.
— Laura - Mar 11, 09:12 PM - #To clarify, I think John means the author “knows less THAN an 8th grader.”
Thanks John for sticking up for high standards in education — too rarely is the question asked, “is our children being educated?”
— DumbingDown - May 20, 07:21 PM - #Devastating, DumbingDown.
— Sean Smith - Jun 10, 09:30 PM - #