Many people believe that an ethnically diverse student body enhances the education of every pupil. A school is truly diverse if there are many different ethnic groups enrolled on campus and those groups have around the same percentage of students enrolled. That means, if a school has one ethnic group that makes up a very large percentage of its student body, it's not very diverse, even though there may be other ethnic groups represented in small percentages on campus.
How do we figure out which schools are more diverse than others? Our campus ethnic diversity mathematical formula produces a diversity index that ranges from 0.0 (entire enrollment is of one racial/ethnic group) to 1.0 (school's enrollment is equally distributed over all racial/ethnic groups). The closer a school's index number is to 1.0, the highest possible value, the more diverse is the student population. Using this approach, we found that the most diverse school in the country is Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey-Newark with a diversity index of 0.74. That means that nearly 3 out of every 4 people you run into there will be from a different ethnic group. Other schools that have a diversity index of 0.70 or higher are University of Houston, Nova Southeastern University (Florida), Polytechnic University (New York), CUNY-Baruch College, CUNY-City College, St. Peter's College (New Jersey), CUNY-Hunter College, La Sierra University (California), Holy Names University (California), California State Polytechnic University-Pomona, California State University-Dominguez Hills, Houston Baptist University, Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology (New York), and CUNY-New York City College of Technology. However, many schools have diversity indexes of around 0.10, which means that around 9 out of 10 people you meet will be from the same race.
We have published the lists of which schools are the most and least ethnically diverse colleges on the free section of our website. You can go to these links to see the schools.
Campus Ethnic Diversity
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