It might come as a shock to some that on this historically forward thinking campus the level of diversity here puts us among the most monochromatic universities in the Midwest. This sad truth has inspired a number of plans to increase minority enrollment and graduation rates over the years, most recently with the failed Plan 2008 initiative. There are a number of reasons why Madison has failed to meet even modest goals over the years despite countless forums and publicized initiatives to add color to the student body.
Since this is still, at least nominally, a public university, one might expect the student body to reflect the overall minority composition of the state if not the country due to the number of out-of-state students. However, African-American and Hispanic students reflect just a fraction of their representation in this state, and even less in the nation. This disparity suggests that not everyone gets an equal shot at an education in this country. Such inequality goes a long way toward explaining why this campus is so overwhelmingly white.
Past campus-wide dialogues about diversity seem to indicate that the university has a real interest in helping minority communities advance in this state and country. Given the failure rate of past efforts, it’s probably time to think about the bigger picture and formulate more effective, if not more ambitious, plans to address the deficit of diversity on campus.
Now there are a number of different definitions of diversity out there, and none are complete without incorporating the socio-economic status of individuals. Family income predicts the chances a young person has of attending and graduating from a post-secondary institution more than race alone does. Unfortunately, the discussion of how to make college more affordable for low-income applicants – the number of which grow daily through the recession – has myopically focused on increasing access to financial aid as opposed to lowering the net cost directly. This is a woefully wrong-headed strategy that sadly gets excessive support from our Chancellor, the Board of Regents and uninspired politicians on the other end of State Street.
Just consider this for a moment. Over the summer the sum of student financial aid debt surpassed the amount of outstanding credit card debt in this country, $829.785 to $826.5 billion. Yes, that’s right; students in this country owe nearly $1 trillion dollars in student loans. To give you an idea of how much that is, the current projections for the cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is over $3 trillion. Just think how many degrees could have been paid for if our troops had stayed home in 2003.
As the student loan default rate continues to increase year after year, it should be obvious to most that funding the university through more and more student loans is a risky if not potentially disastrous strategy for the University of Wisconsin. It will also subvert any of the as of yet piecemeal efforts to increase diversity on campus.
Efforts to diversify have failed largely because they have been directed in-house as listless efforts bounced around the Ivory Tower, too sheepish to hit the streets in the communities we are apparently trying to reach.
Take a look at Milwaukee, a city just recently named the fourth most impoverished in the country with a poverty rate of 27 percent. Milwaukee also happens to be among the most segregated cities in the country and encompasses a number of neighborhoods where African-American unemployment ranges between 60 percent and 70 percent. If UW-Madison wants to pursue the core tenets of the Wisconsin Idea by developing the economy and enhancing the standard of living, putting resources into active development and recruitment of students in Milwaukee’s impoverished and minority communities would be a good place to make head-way.
Simply tinkering with enrollment criteria and process won’t make an ounce of difference for the socio-economic and racial diversity of the campus. Instead, the university needs to allocate real resources, people on the ground, to blighted communities to achieve its goal. One idea that might make a radical difference in the near term would be to shuttle UW students to the needier communities and school districts of Milwaukee, and other Wisconsin cities, to mentor high school students. Not only could undergraduates benefit from working outside their immediate comfort zones by taking a significant step toward buoying cultural sensitivity on campus, but the high school students being mentored could benefit tremendously from working with students that have already proven successful at developing the skills necessary to be admitted. Throw in a 25 percent tuition-remission bonus per semester and a large-scale, and an applied outreach program could be up and running in no time.
Actively helping Wisconsin communities with programs such as these could play a critical role in any real plan to improve diversity on campus. The money exists, and the need for complete education funding has never been greater. By implementing ambitious outreach coupled with a strong movement to increase public education funding and decrease tuition, we might all be able to benefit from universal access to higher education in the not so distant future.
Sam Stevenson ([email protected]) is a graduate student in public health.
