Ivy League Fooled: How America’s Top Colleges Avoid Real Diversity

Back in March, as colleges began to herald their newly admitted classes for PR purposes, the Ivy League schools got to patting themselves on the back.

The Harvard Gazette bragged that Harvard’s newest batch of accepted students included record numbers of blacks and Latinos. Brown said its admitted class was “the most racially … diverse” in the school’s centuries-long history. Dartmouth shared actual percentages, declaring that a full 44 percent of its newest class was composed of students of color. Coincidentally, that was the same percentage of minorities in Penn’s freshman class.

Numbers like these might lead someone to believe that diversity is no longer an issue at America’s most elite colleges. {snip}

It turns out the Ivy League’s racial diversity stats are only half the story. People in search of egalitarianism at places like Harvard and Columbia shouldn’t just be asking what color students are, but where they’re from, too.

Call it the Ivy League’s dirty little secret: While America’s most elite colleges do in fact make it a point to promote ethnic diversity on their campuses, a lot of them do so by admitting hugely disproportionate numbers of wealthy immigrants and their children rather than black students with deep roots–and troubled histories–in the United States.

The problem, of course, isn’t that black immigrants are going to Ivy League schools in large numbers; educational success should be applauded no matter where the student is from. But the large numbers of African immigrants on American college campuses, coupled with the remarkably small numbers of native blacks on those same campuses, calls into question the effectiveness of America’s affirmative action programs. While affirmative action started as a system to right the wrongs of slavery and institutional anti-black racism, helping wealthy immigrants who weren’t here for those struggles doesn’t serve any of the program’s original intentions.

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The statistics are striking: Though African immigrants, many of them from Nigeria and Ghana, make up less than 1 percent of America’s total population, first- and second-generation black immigrants comprise 41 percent of all black students at Ivy League schools, according to 2007 research from teams at Princeton and Penn. Another study, this one published in Sociology of Education in 2009, found that immigrant blacks attended select colleges at almost four times the rate of native-born African Americans. Outside of the Ivy League, almost 44 percent of African immigrants graduated from a four-year college, compared to just 18 percent of native blacks.

{snip} Data shows that African immigrants, Nigerians in particular, are far wealthier and more highly educated than many Americans of any race. In 2000, when the median household income for African Americans was about $30,000, the median income for Nigerian immigrant families was more than $45,000. Where education is concerned, in 2007, African immigrants were likelier to have obtained a college or graduate degree than any other immigrant population, and 20 percent likelier than the U.S. population as a whole.

It’s easy to chalk these numbers up to the myth that immigrants work harder than native blacks, but studies say that’s wrong. According to the aforementioned sociological research from 2009, immigrant students don’t value education more than native blacks or perform significantly better academically. Rather, they have the financial resources required to get a leg-up into the highest echelons of academia.

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