Back when the United States had a predominantly White population (an estimated 80 percent in the 1960s), college campuses were the site of much needed progress when it came to diversity. The programs developed on campuses like Berkeley and even Ivy Leagues like Harvard set the groundwork for what diversity initiatives should look like in the workplace that followed. There was a general urgency about the great need for better opportunities for women and minorities, and the action to facilitate that started in college settings.
As the nation moves toward transitioning to an official minority-majority population (estimates currently place this shift in the year 2043), college and university campuses are more important than ever as the starting place for diversity programs that close achievement gaps and feed a varied workforce population. But are colleges today able to keep up?
Better diversity, everywhere
The good news is that, as a nation, diversity is improving at every turn. We don’t necessarily need to look to our colleges for guidance; the workplace is doing a much better job providing better opportunities for all Americans that value diverse voices. Google has publicly vowed to hire more minorities and women to its tech staffs and Facebook has done the same.
Diversity is seeing support from beyond the private sector as well. President Obama has made it his administration’s mission to address the social and economic issues that minorities face through a variety of programs, including My Brother’s Keeper, which targets the obstacles facing academic and life success for Black young men, and the President’s Commission on Equity and Inclusion, an initiative that addresses the historical inequities that affect the nation. Colleges don’t have to carry the diversity torch alone and that’s not a bad thing.
What it does do, however, is up the game for institutions of higher education. Colleges no longer need to provide the stage for basic discussions on achievement gaps, and wage inequality, and general lack of women and minorities in certain fields, like STEM careers. This doesn’t mean that the college and university landscape should back off, though. It means that, collectively, we should be digging deeper into these issues and find out what changes we can facilitate that go beyond surface level. We don’t have to raise the same awareness we needed to raise a few decades ago. So how can we take the hard work being done in other arenas and make it work for our own progressive agendas?
The next phase
