For months now, students at the University of Missouri have been protesting racism on campus. Among other complaints is that Blacks are underrepresented in the student body, compared to their demographics in the state. Is Mizzou unusual in this regard? Or is the underrepresentation of Black students a more widespread problem?
At the data website FiveThirtyEight, Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Ben Casselman run the numbers and find that Mizzou is typical. At most schools across America, they write, “African-Americans are underrepresented relative to their share of the 18-to 24-year-old population in the state where the University is located. This is true regardless of region, and the difference in the percentages tends to widen in states that have a higher percentage of black residents. Mizzou – where 8.2% of undergraduates are black, compared with 15% of the state’s college-age residents – is almost exactly in line with its peers in terms of how representative its student body is.”
How does Colgate do? According to the website, 5% of the current undergraduate population is Black. In New York State, the percentage of Black 18-24-year-olds is about 17%. You could argue that number is strongly skewed by New York City, and doesn’t apply to upstate. Indeed, Madison County is less than 1% Black, although nearby Syracuse is 25% African-American. (Both of those statistics refer to the whole population, since I couldn’t find the numbers for just college-age people.) However, Colgate does not draw its student population only from central New York, or even from just New York State, but instead from the whole United States, and even the rest of the world. Since racial categories are socially constructed differently in different countries, I’ll leave foreign countries out of it, but in 2012, 16% of the high school graduates in the United States were Black.
submitted by Professor Carolyn Hsu