W. S. Moore III notes that campus diversity stops at the Mason-Dixon line and the white working classes.

An essay at Minding the Campus this week, by Russell K. Nieli, reports that a pair of Princeton sociologists took a look at some highly competitive colleges and universities (average SAT: 1360) to see how diversity issues were reflected in admissions. The results didn’t really surprise me, but maybe they should have:

On an “other things equal basis,” where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.

The fact that colleges stack their admissions process to reach certain demographic profiles is nothing new — just ask folks who were crowded out by the Ivies’ Jewish quotas in past decades. It’s depressing for those of us who believe that so-called elite schools should have elite students (an image these schools eagerly project), but it’s nothing new.

Equally unsurprising is the observation that admissions tend to stratify by social class, which puts working-class and poor whites at the bottom of the heap:

When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low. [Emphasis added.]

As always, some animals are more equal than others. Apparently, someone like my wife, who rose from Appalachian poverty to become an award-winning, national-board certified teacher, wouldn’t have brought an interesting perspective to the world of socioeconomic elites at the top schools. Neither would a correspondent of mine who came from a working-class, single-parent home and has earned two law degrees and has risen through the ranks of the military. But an African-American son of academics from an elite prep school in Hawaii with self-admitted lackluster performance at Occidental can get into Harvard—no problem.

Of course, the more applicants a school rejects, the more selective it becomes according to the ratings. Meanwhile, by accepting kids who can afford to attend, the school also stacks the odds for its yield rate (the percentage of accepted students who choose to attend). Since both selectivity and yield rate factor into how schools are rated, the combo means, in Nieli’s words, that “Some of the private colleges [the researchers] describe would do well to come clean with their act and admit the truth: ‘Poor Whites Need Not Apply!’”

Meanwhile, the researchers went on to find some other traits that seem to destine their holders for rejection:

[T]he private colleges in the Espenshade/Radford study seem to display what might be called an urban/Blue State bias against rural and Red State occupations and values. This is most clearly shown . . . in the study’s treatment of the admissions advantage of participation in various high school extra-curricular activities.

Kids are constantly being told that top colleges want well-rounded students with leadership potential. But again, some kind of leadership activities don’t seem to count:

“Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say [the researchers], “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

I think the unfairness of all this is manifest. Granted, I’d be one of the last to claim that life is fair, but I think it’s particularly indecent for purportedly meritocratic institutions to operate this way, and I’m glad that there are articles like Nieli’s to call them out.

But another aspect of the entire business is this: Consider Sarah Palin. Regardless of what you think of her fitness for various political offices (and I’m undecided), I find it interesting that a knock I’ve heard against her (not least from my fellow academics) is the absence of elite institutions on her resume. It seems to me (and I would wager, to Nieli) that elite institutions don’t want the Sarah Palins (or Mrs. Moores or my correspondent, remember) to begin with. Apparently, folks like that should know their places and stay there without getting uppity.

But don’t dare admit that “diversity” is just another set of Emperor’s New Clothes. Look at how much money and how many jobs go into tailoring them.

H/T: Phi Beta Cons.

W.S. Moore III is Associate Professor of English at Newberry College in Newberry, SC, and he blogs at http://profmondo.wordpress.com/.