David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu have produced an analysis for the New York Times Magazine of “The Top U.S. Colleges With the Greatest Economic Diversity.” What Leonhardt and Wu describe as “a list of the country’s most-selective universities ranked in order of economic diversity” is measured “by analyzing the share of students receiving Pell Grants, which typically go to students from the bottom half of the income distribution.”
“The list covers the 286 most-selective colleges in the country,” they say, “defined by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges and other metrics.” The authors continue, “The data show that over the past decade, some of these selective colleges, especially those with large endowments, have enrolled more students who are economically disadvantaged; at the same time, however, most schools have seen their number of these students decrease.”
The data are indeed interesting. The “most diverse” college by far by their measurement is Berea College in Kentucky, which has been both co-ed and racially integrated since before the Civil War. It is followed by Salem College in North Carolina. Dead last is Tulane, preceded by Oberlin, Fairfield, and Bates.
The word “diversity,” however, is being abused here. Diversity means difference. Pell Grants are need-based aid available only to Americans (not foreign students) and disproportionately given to people in the lowest income brackets. It is true that schools such as Tulane, where only 8 percent of students receive Pell Grants, would appear to lack economic diversity. But 94 percent of Berea’s student body receive Pell Grants. If 94 percent of your student body has something in common, that is less diversity, not more. An actual measure of economic diversity would show a full spectrum from poor students to rich students, each in proportion.
People who speak English rather than woke as a first language understand this. But the habit of liberal/progressive discourse on school admissions, workplaces, and the like is simply to equate “diversity” with maximizing the number of favored groups. When a habit becomes this ingrained, you can no longer even see what you’re doing, to the point where you conclude that maximum diversity would be a student body that consists 100 percent of the same type of person.