table and graph

This assignment was actually pretty challenging for me. I knew right away when reading what the assignment was that I wanted to do something using the topic of diversity at Roger Williams University. Having lived overseas for three years in Paris, France and another two years in Tokyo, Japan I have always noticed the lack of diversity at this school. I will admit that it the diversity around campus has improved a little bit sense my freshman year but the statistics still show that we have a long ways to go before we can consider ourselves as being part of a diverse community on campus. Finding the statistics was actually much harder than I thought it was going to be. At first, I tried going onto the Roger Williams University website to try and find some percentage numbers about diversity distribution on campus but had no luck. When I couldn’t find the information on the RWU website I then asked my friend Derek who also was in the class with us this winter if he knew of any potential websites to find what I was looking for. He suggested one website to me that he used to find his information that he used for his table and graph but it did not have any statistics on diversity that I could find. I then asked my buddy Matt who was also in the class with us and the only other friend I knew in the class and thankfully he too had done his on diversity and told me to use the College Board website that we had used in high school when considering what colleges to apply to. Mathew and I attended the same high school so I knew what he was talking about and was familiar with College Board. The statistics for diversity did not surprise me at all. Seventy one percent of our school population is white. What struck me as odd and or interesting is that twenty one percent of people had their race/ethnicity as unreported. I wondered why so many people would not want to report what race they were. I figured that the majority of these people were probably not white and feared that reporting their race/ethnicity would in some way cause them to be discriminated against during the application process when they applied to RWU. It is sad that with a slogan such as “Learning to bridge the world” that our school has remained so limited in the diversity department. One thing that I learned through living overseas is that diversity is a good thing. It brings about acceptance of others and shows people that we are all humans no matter what the color of our skin is or where in the world we may come from. A well diverse campus is a cultured campus. With a white population of seventy one percent I would consider Roger Williams University to be pretty uncultured. Three percent is the next highest population of a race on campus but what is three percent compared to a staggering and dominant seventy one percent white? I am currently a senior this year and have been here at RWU for close to four years and every year the topic of diversity is brought up in one or two of my classes. Everyone seems to agree that our campus has an extreme lack of diversity yet nothing ever seems to change. I wonder if it is related to tuition prices, the acceptance process, or if people who are not white don’t want to attend a campus where they are going to be a major minority in. Whatever it is I hope that the RWU community is one day a cultured and diverse place to attend school.