How do we measure "diversity?"

 

A New York Times report on socioeconomic diversity has been widely publicized in academic circles over the past few days. The report has a bizarre way of measuring diversity, though. According to the report, the more students receiving Pell Grants, a form of economic support for low-income students, enrolled in an institution, the more diverse it is.

A reasonable definition of “diversity,” as it applies to people, would be have a range of different sorts of individuals. Socioeconomic diversity would refer to the state of containing people from different socioeconomic levels, whether we measure those levels by family incomes, socioeconomic index scores or some other relevant indicators. The more a setting concentrates people at any level; high, medium, or low; by definition, the less “diverse” it is.

But take a look at the ranking in this table:

The Top U.S. Colleges With the Greatest Economic Diversity - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Berea College, with 94% of students receiving Pell Grants, is presented here as the “most diverse.” At the bottom, Oberlin and Tulane, with only 8% of students on the grants, are the “least diverse.” One could dispute the use of Pell Grants as an economic indicator, but, accepting it for the sake of argument, a school with 94% of students who are low income is somehow more diverse than schools with 92% of students with the whole range of incomes above the Pell Grant level. So far, looking at all the news on this data, I haven’t seen anyone questioning this absurdity.

I think part of the problem might be that the word “diversity” has lost any clear meaning as it has become a shibboleth.  Any institution that includes more people judged to be disadvantaged in some way is “diverse,” so that the greater the concentration of disadvantages, the greater the putatively laudable “diversity.” And since “diversity” is an unquestionable moral good in today’s academic culture, the success of every institution should be judged by how much disadvantage it can concentrate.

I’d suggest that even if every school should aim at serving the same populations (a dubious proposition), there might be reasons why a relatively high percentage of affluent students might be desirable. If the school does not have a big endowment or a steady source of philanthropy specifically for the needy, then someone has to pay the costs in order to bring in the 8%, or whatever the portion might be. And that someone has to have the wherewithal to pay the tuition.