Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago

Same discussion yesterday, and it got flagged there as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15089419

EDIT: And same here as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15091217

EDIT: you know after crawling through the comments in that second thread, I don't think this is a topic HN can handle. Many, many (definitely not all though!) of us here grew up in good homes, went to good schools and won the "lottery of interest." To us society feels meritocratic because it mostly is if you can meet those few criteria. So when something comes along and holds that privilege (yes, I used the P-word!) up to your face, shows you that maybe the system isn't as meritocratic as it felt to you, it stings your sense of accomplishment. And then we get people purporting that whites are biologically predisposed to higher IQs or nitpicking minor details or generally just trying to preserve the feeling that I accomplished this.

So before gangster and hip-hop culture totally dominated african american and hispanic cultures? Thomas Sowell who has studied this topic thoroughly points to this as the primary cause of the anti-education attitudes among black youth, who previously in the 1960s were on a positive trajectory towards improving their situation.

The war on drugs, and the rise of drug culture itself, also played a big role in both influencing the culture and on the various socio-economic impacts on the education. So this isn't simply a victim blaming perspective.

And another lesson we can draw from the drug war is that culture and black markets have way more influence than even the most well financed government social engineering projects.

As one of the folks who worked on this — this graphic has already been flagged twice today, and probably will continue to be. So please take an extra minute to read closely and consider carefully before commenting.

To head off some FAQs at the pass:

* The multiracial and Native American categories are calculated, but only displayed when they go above 5% in any year for a given school. Multiracial was only introduced as a category in 2008 — you'll notice some big jumps because of this (U. Hawaii @ Manoa)

* International students — which often make up sizable component of undergraduate diversity in Ivy League schools — are excluded from these. It's U.S. residents only.

* You'll notice some gaps in the 1980's before the data starts being reported consistently in 1990's by the Department of Education.