In recent weeks, American college admissions departments sent out to high school student applicants millions of thick envelopes (good news) and thin envelopes (bad news). But finding out what colleges decided in aggregate is becoming increasingly difficult as more universities respond to the various critiques against them by clamping down on their release of information.
For example, Princeton University announced last month that it was not going to issue its annual press release on how many undergraduate applications it had accepted for admission. It will only publicly announce late in 2022 how many students had enrolled. Princeton’s bureaucrats rationalized their censorship with the implausible argument that increased public ignorance will
…help us keep students central to our work and tamp down the anxiety of applicants.
Princeton’s decision might have something to do with a statistic that Princeton used to announce each April about the applicants it had accepted. In 2014:
…49.2 percent have self-identified as people of color, including biracial and multiracial students.
In 2019:
…56 percent have self-identified as people of color, including biracial and multiracial students.
And in 2021, after George Floyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alma materstated:
Sixty-eight percent of U.S. citizens or permanent residents in the admitted group self-identified as people of color, including biracial and multiracial students.
During the current racial reckoning, it’s mathematically inevitable that for nonwhites to benefit, the children of white parents must suffer. But many white folks are just waking up to that fact. Thus, continuing to issue press releases rubbing their noses in it might be imprudent.