Diversity College Presentation
*charts were created using data from Dept. of Education and U.S. Census
Through the Creative Re-Mix, I was trying to demonstrate not only the difficulty in creating a diverse college campus but how representative or not representative that a college campus is relative to the United States population. At the beginning of my Remix, I asked the class to write one factor that they would consider in admitting students had they been on the admission board for a college. Everyone wrote different factors ranging from socio-economic status to gender. That activity alone demonstrated all the different ways that a small classroom of fewer than thirty students could believe was the best way to consider a student for admission. This disagreement truly does happen in the real world and is demonstrated by the differences in consideration between different colleges and universities. To show this in terms of numbers, I decided to specifically focus on race using different colleges as case studies. I compared the schools to the racial demographics of the greater United States population and made evident how simply one factor cannot prove whether or not a college is diverse. Diversity is a multitude of factors that combined create what we know today as diversity.
My research paper was about Diversity in College and what exactly that means and the best way to implement it. Therefore, my Digital Re-mix connects to it because of the general theme of diversity in universities. Through my research, I discovered that different universities use different admission reviews to create a diverse community while maintaining the academic integrity of the institution. For example, the University of California Berkeley uses a holistic review in which race is not considered as a factor for admissions. Consider this to the policy of the University of Texas Austin which uses a policy in which the top ten percent of every Texas high school is automatically accepted at UT Austin. Caltech, on the other hand, utilizes a race-blind admissions review. I compared these colleges in order to show how if race was the only factor that was to be considered for diversity then certain colleges would not be diverse at all. However, looking at a combination of factors, the conclusion may be a little different.
Through the process of creating these two assignments, I learned a lot about colleges and finding creative ways to present the information that I have learned. The creative project made me critically evaluate the best way to demonstrate the new information that I had learned as well as the conclusion I had made based on my findings.