Exactly how many minorities are there on UA’s campus? I decided to find out by delving into the Office of Institutional Research. They are hidden in an old, cramped building behind Rose Administration, but the staff is really helpful and there is tons of modern demographic data readily available online. As of Fall 2008, UA’s undergraduate demographics shake out something like this:
In practical terms that boils down to: “Wow, there sure are a lot of white people here!”; “I see a fair number of black people walking around campus too”; “Was that an Asian/Hispanic person I just saw?!”; Chris Rock’s stand-up bit about how no one’s ever seen a Native American family chilling out eating dinner at Red Lobster.
It’s difficult to gauge whether Alabama’s numbers would be considered “good” or “fair” or “progressive.” When it comes to college admissions, such words mean different things to different people. But I thought an interesting metric would be to compare UA to other SEC schools–all of them are large public universities that serve as premiere institutions in their respective states (excepting Vanderbilt, which will be woefully unequipped for SEC football now and forever). How does the Capstone compare to these big-name Southern schools?
These numbers look only at undergraduate enrollment (except Arkansas, where undergrad-only data was not readily available) and exclude non-resident aliens and multiracial or race unknown categories. Alabama seems to be floating in the lower middle half on this “diversity” scale, just looking at hard data. Florida further cements their status as not really being part of the South by blowing away every other school in recruiting minorities.
I wonder whether the average student would guess that UA is 15% students of color? Anectodtally, many of the students I interviewed, specifically minority students, thought the number was less.
“Minority” is a broad category, though. Looking at specific races tells very different stories.
(please note that Ole Miss did not have racially specific data available on their website)
When it comes to African Americans, UA is almost leading the pack in terms of percentages. Ironic for a school that so desperately wanted to remain all white half a century ago. Seeing a specifc-race breakdown also conveys different things than the general minority graph. For instance we see that Mississippi State’s minority population is almost exclusively black.
Ouch. Alabama’s low number here may be related to my exclusion of non-resident aliens from the calculations. I don’t really know. It’s also worth noting that the state of Alabama has about a 1% Asian population according to 2007 Census data (though using state demographics as a metric opens up a nasty can of worms when looking at other races, as I will discuss later). Florida, Vanderbilt, and Georgia also benefit from being more academically prestigious schools, which often attract many Asian American applicants.
Here UA is in the middle once again, though the data is pretty lopsided thanks to Florida’s huge Hisapnic population. Again UA’s percentage isn’t too far off the state’s (2.7%).
Overall Florida and Vanderbilt seem to be the most racially balanced schools in the SEC, at least in numeric terms. But Vanderbilt is an elite private school and the state of Florida is the most diverse in the Southeast. Here in the Bible Belt, UA seems to be performing decently, but it would be difficult to call the Capstone a leader in promoting diversity in enrollment.
Leave a comment with your thoughts.
