Free Republic

When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race.

A study of the admissions patterns of 50 of America's top colleges and universities shows how hard it is to be admitted if you are poor and white. Russell K. Nieli analyzed research done by Princeton professors Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. Their study found that most private colleges don't want to waste limited scholarship money on students who don't enhance the racial diversity of a campus: "Poor whites are apparently given little weight as enhancers of campus diversity, while poor non-whites count twice in the diversity tally, once as racial minorities and a second time as socio-economically deprived." But...

On average black students do much worse on the SAT and many other standardized tests than whites. While encouraging progress was made in the 1970s and early 1980s in improving black SAT scores and reducing the black/white test score gap, progress in this direction came to a halt by the early 1990s, and today the gap stands pretty much where it was twenty years ago. Whereas whites and Asians today average a little over 500 on the math and reading portions of the SAT, blacks score only a little over 400 -- in statistical metric a gap of a full...