Anonymous wrote:DD would like to look at liberal arts schools but I am concerned about the lack of diversity. Majority of these schools are 70-75% white with as low as 1-5% asians. Any input from asian parents who have kids at liberal arts schools with relatively less asian population please share your and your childs experience. Thanks
One way to answer this is to figure out the reasons for the concern.
If she wants to be able to take Asian history and language courses, she could just make sure to focus on schools with, say, a minimum number of Chinese classes, or something like that.
If she wants to be able to buy certain types of food: Use Google maps to figure out how close Asian (or Japanese, Chinese, etc.) groceries and restaurants are to the school. You could even try emailing the owners and ask them if they think the school is a good school for kids from your daughter’s demographic group.
If your daughter is afraid of discrimination or just feeling odd: Look at how she thinks of that. If she’s Chinese, and she’d be angry if she were around students who were hazy about the difference between Koreans and Chinese people, then she might need a school with many Asian students. If she’s just afraid of open discrimination and hostility: I have a hard time believing that there are any decent U.S. schools where that would be common. But your daughter could limit herself to schools with active Asian student groups, where you can reach a group officer and the officer endorses the school.
If, in your heart, your daughter would like to pass on her heritage by marrying someone from her group: The ideal
would be send your daughter to school in the region with the ideal dating pool. If that’s not possible, and getting into a duper selective school would be too hard, maybe use Census data, or your own knowledge, to figure out where a lot of people from your daughter’s demographic group live. (Whether that means “Asian,” or something more specific, like “Thai.”) Look at colleges in and near those communities. Maybe they end up with a lot of kids in the desired demographic group by default.