Misleading Depictions of Diversity
Chronicle of Higher Ed | Adrienne Lu
In this Race on Campus piece, Adrienne Lu explains how colleges misrepresent the diversity of their campuses in brochures and other marketing materials. “Colleges have employed various tactics, from offering questionable statistics to digitally altering photographs to replace white faces with brown ones.”
Lu cites Timothy D. Pippert, co-author of a paper published in 2013 on the subject, explaining that “racial diversity is being used as a commodity in the marketing of higher education.” He recounts the story of a student who transferred schools “after being disappointed to learn that another college was far less diverse than marketing materials had led them to believe it was.”
Another study cited “found that 81 percent of colleges added international students to tables designed to report U.S. race or ethnicity.”
Interestingly, a 2021 study Lu references “found that more-selective institutions were more likely to ‘actively display’ their diversity and emphasize minority-student populations than were less-selective ones…[and] that less-selective colleges — while more diverse, on average — were less likely to promote the ethnic or racial diversity of their campuses or omit white students or add international students in representations of diversity.”
According to Lu, a spokesperson for California Polytechnic State University noted the “delicate balance” between representing actual percentages and presenting “what we aspire to be.”
Related
Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones? (NYT, 2004)
