University diversity still limited

Steven Zhang, a rising senior at Cornell University, is an intern for Newsday Opinion.

In late spring, I was having lunch with a few friends at my college's dining hall. We were joking that our table would have made a perfect photo-op for the university to flaunt the diversity of its student body.

At the table were blacks, whites, Asian-Americans and Hispanics. But upon deeper inspection, we were more alike than it appeared. Most of us were raised in the upper-middle class Northeastern suburbs, took SAT prep classes, played varsity sports, graduated from private high schools, and were lucky to come from a household of two educated parents.

If there weren't a question asking us to check a box for our ethnicity, our college applications would have been almost identical.

And that's when I realized how inadequate the standards of diversity have become in higher education, especially at brand-name schools where affirmative action is hotly debated. Unfortunately, current efforts pushing for more diversity, like the recent federal appeals ruling overturning Michigan's affirmative action ban on state campuses, have been inadequate as well.

The question shouldn't be whether diversity is necessary. The real question is what constitutes meaningful diversity -- and how can it be achieved in a meritocracy. Surely we can't believe that Sasha and Malia Obama deserve the same preferences for admission based on race as a teen raised in difficult circumstances in New York City. Even their own father says they shouldn't.

Diversity is de rigueur for any respectable institution of higher learning, but as conceived today, it's often little more than a collection of skin colors. Universities may boast double-digit minority percentages among students, but they can't achieve true diversity by recruiting mainly from the top affluent high schools.

Instead, what schools have these days is a faux-diversity hyperfocused on race, leading to ethnically colorful but socioeconomically bland campuses. The admissions process, with its emphasis on percentiles and standardized scores, favors the well-off and testing-savvy. The student who had to sacrifice his evenings working at the local store instead of studying for the SATs is handicapped.

And so race-based affirmative action has become an unnecessary controversy that has distracted us from the true problem of inequality in higher education. And it is a debate that could be resolved if schools recruited across our country's socioeconomic divides.

But that's not happening at our nation's top schools. According to a 2004 study by the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, 74 percent of students at 146 selective colleges came from the top 25 percent in family income, while only 3 percent come from the bottom 25 percent.

The same goes for public schools, where more students are coming from wealthy families. In another study done at 42 selective state schools by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, some 40 percent of freshmen came from families making more than $100,000. (The average family income in the United States is around $50,000.) Colleges may recruit whites and minorities, but they are relatively affluent whites and minorities.

That's bad news for both sides of the widening income gap. While our universities can churn out graduates with the ability to speak three languages and code complex algorithms, too many have spent their lives insulated in an affluent bubble. Meanwhile, the poor remain trapped in a cycle of poverty resulting from a lack of education.

With tuition prices surging 439 percent in the past 30 years, college hopefuls no longer face an ethnic barrier, but a financial one. And that is what keeps our universities separated and unequal.