The Wall Street Journal revealed which colleges and universities have the most diversity on its campuses. Spoiler alert: public, urban schools take the top spots.
According to WSJ, public institutions in inner cities have continued to struggle with state funding cuts. This does not stop them, however, from having the most multicultural learning environments.
The environment score of the rankings go above several measures to measure a school's inclusiveness. It ranges from the percentage of first-time college graduates and Pell Grant recipients to the diversity of an institution's students and staff. The percentage of international students also affects the schools' scores.
It was noted that systems such as the City University of New York and the California State University have campuses that are among the leaders in supporting students and staff from various socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds across the nation.
Moreover, a lot of small private schools with religious affiliations are also leaders in diversity, even if they placed low in the overall rankings. Private Seventh-day Adventist school, La Sierra University, based in Riverside, CA, is no. 1 in for environment even if it was not able to nab a spot in the top 600 overall.
About 40 percent of La Sierra students are Hispanic U.S. residents while 16 percent are foreign students. The school's poor performance in the overall rankings is partly caused by poor loan repayment rates and limited research output.
City College of New York comes at second place for environment. The school, which has around 16,000 students, took the 305th spot in the overall rankings. More than half of its undergraduates received Pell Grants, a government subsidy for low-income students. According to recent federal data, one-third of its student body consisted of Hispanics, 21 percent were Asian and 17 percent were black.
Urban public schools in California also have diverse student bodies, each having a large proportion of non-native students. The University of California - Irvine got the eighth spot for environment while UCLA got 10th place.
