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Jake Foley-Keene, The Diamondback insist, UMD obfuscates the truth of its low minority enrollment.
If there’s a recurring theme
throughout my columns, it’s that the University of Maryland prioritizes
prestige over all else. Prestige fuels the university’s decision-making
process, whether it’s in deciding to overfund STEM and athletics, to take money from unethical-but-wealthy donors, to continue in-person classes
or to generally refuse to acknowledge any errors it has made or
problems it has. This is particularly salient regarding issues of race,
as this university cares more about appearing as a safe, diverse and
unified school than actually being one. This was the case when it
released data about spiking freshman enrollment for Hispanic and Black or African American students.
The administration building.
Photo: Joe Ryan/The Diamondback
Compared to many other colleges around the country, this university is fairly diverse. In fact, of over 3,500 schools ranked for diversity on College Factual, this university checked in at 132. But it’s no secret that higher education is a bastion for entrenched privilege. Even the freshman class, as diverse as the university claims it to be, is still only about 11 percent Black or African American and about 8 percent Hispanic, compared to the greater college age population, which as of 2017 was 14 percent Black and 22 percent Hispanic.
To be clear, a lack of racial diversity is a problem at many major colleges. Because of the system of entrenched wealth and education, I can’t entirely blame the university for lagging behind national population averages...
And Black or African American students are better represented in the state school system: From 2017 to 2019, the proportion of Black or African American students in Maryland public schools never dipped below one-third. But in the same time period at this university, that figure was never more than one in eight.
Source: The Diamondback
