WORD COUNT 628                                                                                                                                                            JUNE 25, 2008   

COLLEGE, THE NEW MELTING POT – by William A. Collins

American

Diversity;

Swamping

Universities.

High school used to be America’s chief melting pot, but since our nation has gone back to segregating its schools, much of that duty has now fallen to a different institution – college.

Decades ago, I spent an illuminating semester at a special program in Washington, D.C., the most memorable part being a required night course. The bulk of the students were from foreign lands and English was strictly a tertiary language. Bless the professor for his patience. It was surely an eye-opener for the few Yankees in the class.

But now those heavy ethnic mixtures are much more common in higher education. Immigration is rampant, the white birth rate is low, and wealthy foreigners want their kids to study here. While some of us may feel that American colleges remain a bit hidebound, compared with Asian, African, and Latin American schools, they are models of free inquiry. And with the Baby Boomers’ youth now past, administrators are suddenly scrambling to fill some of those empty desks.

This is swell for working-class Americans who have painfully observed that there aren’t many manufacturing jobs around anymore, unless you’d care to move to Taiwan. Now our kids really do need college, even just to qualify for mom and dad’s same old work. For example in the old days, our daughter-in-law learned veterinary tech work on the job and picked up needed certificates along the way. Now her daughter, another horse whisperer, needs a degree just to get in the door.

And so do less technical workers. So, more and more young people with remarkably humble preparation are flooding the gates of academia looking for that ticket to a higher rung on the economic ladder. This means that Connecticut’s community colleges, the new kids on the education block, are booming, even as our traditional universities have to dig a little deeper into the applicant pool. And often that digging unearths still more foreign students to spice up and complicate the academic mix.

Which is OK. Our kids learn as much from them as they learn from us. That’s pretty much the concept of the melting pot anyway. And as students from the lower income rungs spiral upward into community colleges, state colleges, and the less-storied private universities, what’s wrong with that? It’s like the classic American GI story following WWII.

Well, one thing wrong is money. College has gotten expensive, really expensive. And so have the loans needed to nurse one through the process. Many poorer kids have to drop out. And with a layered public college system like Connecticut’s, the melting pot starts separating. UConn and the state universities tend to gobble up the whites and Asians, while blacks, Latinos and immigrants tend to sift down to the local institutions.

Ironically, the Bush administration is unwittingly countering this separatist trend. By reneging on promised funding to historically black and Indian colleges, it is forcing more and more minority students out into integrated public schools, thus pushing up their diversity ratio. Not necessarily a bad outcome, except that many poor kids inevitably do then fall through the cracks trying to make the transition.

And so running a college today is no picnic. If it isn’t the uppity women in your face, it’s the macho alumni on your back. If it isn’t shady student loan companies darkening your reputation, it’s slippery professors fudging federal grant reports. And now it’s shrinking white enrollments that force the acceptance of more foreign and minority students. Colleges originally were meant to be elite institutions, not melting pots. If their administrators had wanted to be integration counselors they’d have gone into social work. But now suddenly we’re assigning them to remix the cultural ingredients of America. We may need to cut them a little more slack.

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Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. A photo of Bill Collins is available CLICK HERE

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