Duke & Diversity

Elizabeth Oates has some interesting thoughts about Duke and the perceptions of elitism there, and we thought you might be interested in her thoughts
Reading some recent articles on the fine DBR website links has led me to conclude that many people view Duke as “privileged” or “elite” in the sense of being white or “whiter” than other comparable basketball-playing Division I schools. But is this a true perception? A comparison with other ACC schools is interesting: Which schools are the most diverse? And especially, as this seems to be the real issue here, which have the best African-American representation?

First, in a perfect world, let us assume, the percent enrollment in a nation’s colleges of a particular ethnic group would perfectly mirror the percent of the overall college age population made up of that ethnic group. That is to say—if (to use a hypothetical example) there were 5% Latvians in the “college age” US population, then 5% of every college population would also be made up of Latvians.

What then would be a school’s population base? What area should a school be compared to, for minority enrollment matching? For the ACC schools, there ended up being several categories of population base. The state schools get most of the students from their state, and that is their mandate—their comparison population is the minority make-up of the state they are located in. One exception—Georgia Tech—52% of their students come from Georgia and 48% are from out-of-state. To calculate their perfect world make-up the appropriate proportions were summed together. Duke and Wake Forest are easy--both have a truly national cachement area for their student body, and their ideal world is the US general population figures. BC and Miami, although private schools as well, were a little trickier, due to their strong regional base—Miami is about 60% Florida and 40% national, and BC gets about 60+% of its student body from just four states-NY, NJ, CT and MA. Again the correct proportions were summed together to create a base population for comparison.
Enough of prologue—on with the show:

Some interesting information—looks like elitist Duke did the best at reaching our utopian standard. It is also interesting to see that the public state-supported schools did not do much better in serving this minority population that some very expensive private schools. And, Clemson-put those sheets away!

A note on methodology—US and State population make up was collected from 2004 estimates from the US Census webpage. Information on colleges is mostly 2004 data when available and was collected from state government web pages or the university’s own websites. I used undergraduate enrollment figures as this is the area of interest—if schools did not break their figures down that way—I gave them the benefit of the doubt and extrapolated that best one-year figure for enrolled students available—by multiplying by four. Again if there were conflicting numbers for enrollment, I gave the schools the benefit of the doubt and selected that figure to give them the best African-American to total student body ratio. A hand calculator was used for adding, etc. and I did not feel like rechecking, so there could be some calculation errors.

I used, for both the census data and the university data, the total populations and the population identified as “black” or “African-American.” I excluded “other,” “multicultural,” “unknown,” “Hispanic-black” etc. from consideration, which may have led to some underreporting of “black” students, especially in US Census data, which could skew the results a bit in all the school’s favor. There are some subtleties I ignored as well-such as not using an age specific US and state population—the percentage of African Americans is slightly higher in the “college age group.” Thre cachement areas are approximate—for example Duke gets more people from New York than Utah, and Wake Forest gets about 25% of its student body from NC, versus about 12% for Duke. The size of the relative populations does not matter, in case anyone wonders.

I used, for both the census data and the university data, the total populations and the % identified as “black” or “African-American” I excluded “other” “multicultural” “unknown,” “Hispanic-black” etc. from consideration, which may have led to some underreporting of “black” students, especially in US Census data, which could skew the results a bit in all the school’s favor. There are some subtleties I ignored as well-such as not using an age specific US and state population—the percentage of African Americans is slightly higher in the “college age group.” The size of the relative populations does not matter, in case anyone wonders.