Pace Press

Issue date: 4/20/04 Section: Features

African Americans comprise 11 percent of the total Pace population

Students at the University will likely notice that there exists a wide variety of cultures and races present on campus. Students are inundated with flyers from different ethnic organizations advertising, "Join our meeting! All are welcome." In the cafeteria, one is bombarded by all the different social clusters, almost always divided by ethnic groups. The corridors of Pace tell a story of diversity and multiculturalism but do the classrooms paint the same picture?

In order to examine the diversity at Pace, I requested some hardcore statistics from the Enrollment office. What I discovered may surprise you. According to the Enrollment office, the New York City campus is a learning institution for eight thousand six hundred and sixty-eight students, of this total, five thousand and six hundred and twelve students are undergraduates and three thousand and thirty-six students are pursuing their graduate degree.

Of the 8,668 total, Caucasians are the leading ethnic group; they make up approximately 41 percent of the student population at Pace. Asian/Pacific Islander are the second leading ethnic group and make up 14 percent of the population, closely following are African Americans with 11 percent. Hispanics make up a reportedly 10 percent, and American Indian/Alaska Native account for less than 0.2 percent of the overall student body. Approximately 15 percent of students either reported themselves as "other" or "unknown,' and NRAs (non-resident aliens) make up roughly nine percent of the population.

Having examined the demographics of the student population, it is also important to consider the demographics of those teaching at the University. Throughout my career at Pace, I have had more than 30 professors and only a staggering one of them has been African-American. So, I suspect that the ethnic disparity among professors is even greater than that of the students.

The enrollment results confirm my hypothesis exactly. Eighty-four percent of full-time faculty members at Pace are Caucasian. Distantly following are Asian/Pacific Islander faculty members; they make up approximately seven percent of the full-time faculty population. African-American professors make up four percent, while Hispanic professors make up 2.3 percent. American Indian/Alaska Native professors make up a mere 0.7 percent. A little less than two percent of our professors were characterized as either other or non-resident aliens.

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