How Vital is Geographic Diversity?

Jared Hobson — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:33:45 +0000

This winter, the University of Northern Colorado hosted a great program for Colorado counselors to come and learn about their campus. We had the chance to speak with faculty, take a tour, visit the business school, and learn about their admissions process.
The University of Northern Colorado is a midsize university of about 10,000 undergraduate students and 2,000 graduates in Greeley, Colorado. It is a campus dedicated to providing an excellent education at a reasonable cost. In fact, it has the lowest cost of any major university in Colorado. Greeley is a small city about a half hour from Fort Collins and an hour from Denver and is surrounded by farmland (hence the smell of cows you can’t miss upon arrival).
The University of Northern Colorado has some incredible programs to choose from. Its nursing, elementary education, business, performing arts, and athletic training programs are top notch. Add in a beautiful new residence hall that looks like a hotel, a spirited student body (cheer for the Bears) and small class sizes with personal attention and you’ve got a lot of great things to explore. Overall, I was impressed with what UNC had to offer to students and was pleasantly surprised by the caliber and competitiveness of some of their programs and dedication of the faculty and staff with whom I had the chance to interact.
However, as you are looking at colleges one question you may want to ask yourself is – how important is the geographic diversity of a campus? Geographic diversity refers to where the students who attend the college are coming from. For example, at UNC, close to 90% of the students who attend are from the state of Colorado. How do you think this impacts the classroom discussion or life on campus? As you look at colleges you may decide for yourself that you are perfectly happy being surrounded by students who grew up in the same place you did. In addition, you may have a good understanding that even though a majority are from Colorado, a student who grew up in rural eastern CO, the mountains of western CO, and in urban Denver all bring different perspective to the table. It may also prompt you to ask questions about what other types of diversity exist on the campus. For example, while UNC may be lacking in geographic diversity they do offer diversity in another sense. Almost 40% of their students are first generation students meaning they are the first in their family to go to college.
Juniors, as you conduct your college visits this spring and summer don’t forget to ask the tour guide, and yourself, the tough questions!

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Haverford College–Admissions Rate Down, Diversity Up

Jared Hobson — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:44:40 +0000

On a recent visit to Haverford College in Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia), I picked up the student newspaper to read a front page headline about admissions statistics. I then sat down to comment on what I read.

If you prefer, you may read the transcript below.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
**************
You know whenever I’m visiting a college campus one of the things I do is I pick up a copy of the school newspaper just to take a look and a quick flip through to see what’s going on on campus. And of course this is the end of April/ beginning of May and the cover story is all about admissions and I’m on the campus now of Haverford College which is a selective liberal arts school outside of Philadelphia and it’s a great little place, a beautiful campus.

It’s a Quaker school traditionally so a more liberal student body in some ways. The Quakers are known for their commitment to social justice so that’s sort of a hallmark of this campus. But a very nice liberal arts school with a very selective admissions policy. But the cover story here is about the acceptance rates are down and diversity is up.

So there are two things that colleges like to do when they are doing their admissions; one is to make it more selective, make it harder to get in so it will have more applications than there are actual spots; and then the other thing is to increase their diversity. One of the things that they’ve said here is that for the first time accepted students from California outnumber students from New York.

You know a small liberal arts college like this there are lots and lots of people from the mid-Atlantic states and surrounding regions that will apply to a school like Haverford where they have a tougher time finding people from other parts of the country—the South, the middle West, the far West, the mountain states where I’m from. So diversity is a goal that every college has in its admissions process. They want to have a student body that is largely representative of the country and of the planet. They try to get as many international students as they possibly can too.

So thinking about admissions many times students forget that if they’re applying to a college and if they are denied, they forget that colleges have agendas. And one of the agendas clearly at Haverford is the desire to have a more representative, more diverse student body—not just in terms of the colors of students and the socioeconomic backgrounds, but also just the place where they came from. So California is up, New York is down. Different colleges have different formulas. It pays to pay attention to these as you’re applying and as you’re deciding where it is you want to go.

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How Vital is Geographic Diversity?

Haverford College–Admissions Rate Down, Diversity Up