Looking for a College With a Diverse Student Body?

Many prospective college students and their parents believe that an ethnically diverse student body enhances the education of every pupil on campus. A university is truly diverse if there are many different ethnic groups enrolled on campus and those groups have around the same percentage of students enrolled. In other words, if a college has only one ethnic group that makes up the vast percentage of its entire student body, it's not very diverse, even though it might have many other ethnic groups represented in very small percentages.

[See our list of Great Schools at Great Prices.]

We have published the lists of the most and least ethnically diverse colleges on our Web site; the lists are broken down by college category:

National Universities

National Liberal Arts Colleges

Regional Universities: North | South | Midwest | West

Regional Colleges: North | South | Midwest | West

How we determine diversity: Using 2009-2010 academic year data, 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 more diverse its student population Many schools have diversity indexes of around 0.10, which means that approximately nine of 10 people you are likely to meet at that school will be of the same race.

[Read the campus ethnic diversity methodology.]

Using this approach, we concluded that, for the third year in a row, 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 three out of every four 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)

SUNY College—Old Westbury

St. Peter's College (New Jersey)

CUNY—City College

CUNY—Baruch College

CUNY—Brooklyn College

CUNY—Hunter College

CUNY—John Jay College of Criminal Justice

La Sierra University (California)

Houston Baptist University

California State University—East Bay

California State University—Dominguez Hills

Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology (New York)

CUNY—New York City College of Technology

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