The Ohio Board of Regents 2007 Diversity Report (The Post, February 27, 2008) makes the diversity problem at Ohio's public universities very clear: White, non-Hispanics are greatly underrepresented. According to the Regents' report, they compose only 78 percent of university students statewide, whereas they compose 84 percent of the Ohio population according to the Statistical Abstracts of the United States (http://www.census.gov/census2000/states/oh.html). Multiplying university enrollment data provided by U.S. News and World Report (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/tools/search.php) by the percentages in the Regents' report reveals that the under-representation of minorities at three Ohio public universities, including Ohio University, totals 1,010 students, while the over-representation of minorities at nine other public universities in Ohio totals 11,964 students. This excess minority enrollment in nine Ohio universities statewide is considerably more than the entire enrollment at the University of Cincinnati.
Thus, the Regents' report indicates that, retaining current minority enrollments, Ohio universities would need to recruit 68,463 new white, non-Hispanic students in order to rectify the current net over-representation of minorities by 10,954 students statewide. Imagine building copies of OU, the University of Cincinnati and the Ohio State University and populating them entirely with white, non-Hispanic students. That would still leave white, non-Hispanics in the OU system 742 students short of their representation in the Ohio population.
The Regents' report also indicates the existence of approaches that are never discussed for reducing the variation in diversity between universities in Ohio. For example, the under-representation of minorities at three Ohio universities could be eliminated by closing the financially and academically beleaguered Central State University and admitting its student body (1,747 total, 1,451 minority) to the three universities.
If the minority students at Central State University insist upon staying there, then the under-representation of minorities at the three universities could also be eliminated by limiting minority over-enrollment at other public universities in Ohio to 31 percent and admitting the 1,050 minority students thereby excluded from Cleveland State University to the three universities. Thus, the extreme over-representation of minorities in Ohio's public universities statewide enables the local under-representation of minorities at three of those 13 universities to be eliminated without constitutionally questionable diversity policies, racially divisive diversity campaigns, or expensive minority recruitment drives.
Furthermore, if there are not 1,050 minority students at Cleveland State University or at other Ohio public universities who would willingly enroll at the three universities with under-represented minorities, one must ask whether the state of Ohio really has a responsibility to aggressively recruit even more excess minority students in order to achieve local objectives that minorities themselves shun?
Lyn Bowman is a research associate at Ohio University.
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Letter to the Editor
