U.S. Urges Creativity by Colleges to Gain Diversity

The New York Times

By SAM DILLON


The Obama administration on Friday urged colleges and universities to get creative in improving racial diversity at their campuses, throwing out a Bush-era interpretation of recent Supreme Court rulings that limited affirmative action in admissions.

The new guidelines issued by the Departments of Justice and Education replaced a 2008 document that essentially warned colleges and universities against considering race at all. Instead, the guidelines focus on the wiggle room in the court decisions involving the University of Michigan, suggesting that institutions use other criteria — students’ socioeconomic profiles, residential instability, the hardships they have overcome — that are often proxies for race. Schools could even grant preferences to students from certain schools selected for, among other things, their racial composition, the new document says.

“Post-secondary institutions can voluntarily consider race to further the compelling interest of achieving diversity,” reads the 10-page guide sent to thousands of college admissions officials on Friday afternoon. In some cases, it says, “race can be outcome determinative.”

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/education/us-urges-campus-creativity-to-gain-diversity.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

The Culture of Some Colleges May Foster Gender Segregation by Major, Study Finds

The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 22, 2011

By Peter Schmidt
Las Vegas
Certain colleges may have cultures that nudge female students into stereotypically female fields and men into stereotypically male ones, suggests a study whose findings are slated to be presented here on Tuesday at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association.
Colleges that have relatively few women among their tenured faculty members and exceptionally small numbers of men among their undergraduates generally have higher levels of gender segregation by major than do other institutions, the study found. So do colleges with football teams in Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, suggesting that those with athletic programs that emphasize male-dominated sports are less likely to encourage the gender integration of various academic fields, according to a paper summarizing the study's results.

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Culture-of-Some-Colleges/128781/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en