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Comment by AinderS | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Although US graduate students are only 53% white [1] (while the US is 57.8% white [2]) and women account for 53% of doctoral degrees [3], all 5 of the people in the generic stock photos in the article are white males, despite making up only an estimated 25% of graduates. A striking deviation from the photographic trend if one e.g. google image searches for "phd graduate".

[1] https://www.equityinhighered.org/indicators/enrollment-in-gr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

[3] https://www.statista.com/chart/15685/doctoral-degrees-awarde...

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You could go further and observe that all of the article's pictured students are graduating from Oxford, whereas the article discusses students at US universities.

But that's grasping at straws — it really has no bearing on the article itself.

A search for "uk phd graduate" or "uk university students" likewise yields exceedingly diverse results.

Presumably a bored photo editor, trying to think of "elite" images, typed in "oxford university graduation" into Getty Images and got these results: https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/oxford-university-graduat...

This is especially true of PhD/DPhil programmes at places like Oxford: their intake is massively international, unlike their undergraduate provision which hews to (a small slice of) England.

You usually see men hanging with other men, and women with other women.

There are 2 pictures shown.

If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random, it would be completely common for both pictures to end up like the ones in the article.

> If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random

Yes. But if a Washington Post photographer went (or chose the pictures), it's vanishingly uncommon. A duckduckgo image search, limited to washingtonpost.com, of "phd graduation", "phd students", "phd graduate", "graduation", or "university students", yields almost no such pictures. Almost all are either very diverse, or entirely black.

They only find whites when it comes to "elites" "dominating".

Yes, it's true that stock photos usually have this "checkbox diversity" where the photo must contain one of each (one white, one black, one man, one woman, etc)

Yeah that should be two Chinese people, an Indian and then white male and female if it needs to match my anecdata at university.

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