Measurement is tricky, but it looks as if white students may now be a minority at all the Ivy League undergraduate colleges. This has happened recently, and to say it this way actually understates how much the student population of these schools has changed, because using “white” as a category misses how many more of those students come from nonaffluent families and from non-WASP backgrounds than was traditional at the Ivies. When you change the demographics of any institution, you inevitably also change the politics. Elite colleges’ deep commitment to diversity in admissions has generated a more contentious campus life, with heated public arguments about what’s taught, about the social mores of the community, about who gets to speak publicly and about which historical figures deserve veneration.
One should be careful, though, about jumping to the conclusion that the Ivies are now playing an entirely new, insurrectionist role in American society. The competition for the reward of elite status that they confer is more intense than it has ever been, and the increased diversity of their student populations doesn’t seem to have diminished the “funnel effect,” in which an impressively broad range of students depart to enter, mainly, an impressively narrow range of well-paid occupations: finance, consulting and technology. At most of the Ivies, student interest in economics and engineering is at historic highs, and in the humanities at historic lows.
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