The Education Trust concludes of trends in accessibility across top public universities: “Our findings show very little progress has been made since 2000, and the overwhelming majority of the nation’s most selective public colleges are still inaccessible for Black and Latino undergraduates. The lack of accessibility to top public universities is a national problem. CU Boulder is overwhelmingly inaccessible to Black students, that is just a fact. Consider also that The University of Colorado Boulder has a large proportion of out-of-state students, and 13.4% of Americans are Black or African American. That report estimated that in Colorado (in 2017) about 4.9% of 18 to 24-year-olds were Black, a figure much higher than CU Boulder enrollment. In a 2020 report the Education Trust gave the University of Colorado Boulder an “F” for Black student access. A long-stated goal of campus leaders has been to increase the diversity of its student population. Currently in fall 2021, CU Boulder has an undergraduate enrollment of 29,511 students, of which 802 or about 2.7% are Black/African American. The lack of diversity in our Environmental Studies Program is by no means unique across the various departments on campus. No wonder I have had so few Black students in my courses. Since Environmental Studies was established in 1994, only 20 African American students entered our program as freshmen, out of 2,526 (<1%) total students. Of those 2 (two) have identified as “African American” (my campus uses various terminology to describe its demographics, in what follows I use what the cited source uses when describing their data). Over the past 5 years the program that I belong to, Environmental Studies, has enrolled 622 entering freshmen. To the credit of CU Boulder, these data are readily and publicly available.Ĭonsider these facts. To start, let’s look at some numbers from my campus – which are troubling and embarrassing. Today, I look at the population of Black students as undergraduates at my institution. Diversity has many facets on a university campus – faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students, athletics, programs etc., as well as different elements typically considered under the umbrella of diversity, such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, economics, politics, etc. Uncomfortable as it may be, change starts at home.
My vu boulder series#
This is the first in a series of posts on diversity in higher education and at CU Boulder in particular. CU Boulder is one of the least diverse and most inaccessible campuses among universities in the nation. Despite various initiatives, lofty goals and frequent statements of the importance of diversity from administrators, that remains the case today. Soon after arriving I started wondering about a troubling pattern in my classes. I’ve been on the faculty at CU Boulder since 2001.
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