Diversity in Higher Education especially in Athletics

Running Head : DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION LESSONS FROM ATHLETICS

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May 30 , 2009

Introduction

The era of affirmative action in the university admissions in the United States is more or less over . A lot of resistance was raised against race-based admissions for various reasons (Honan , 1996 ranging from the hypothesis that affirmative action was not beneficial to the candidates admitted through this mechanism as seen through the high dropout rate to that affirmative action was tantamount to discrimination against candidates

of other races who have equal or better qualifications than their minority contemporaries

As such , colleges have faced a challenge of ensuring that there is diversity among members of the student body . However , athletics departments are among those least affected by racial homogeneity since they usually have among the most diverse racial compositions . The major question is whether the universities can draw from the model of these departments to improve their diversity without compromising on the principals of equal opportunity

ATHLETICS AND RACIAL DIVERSITY

In the report `Winning through Diversity : Lessons from Intercollegiate Athletics in Creating Community from Difference ' released by the university of Kansas (Wolf-Wendel et al , 2000 , diversity can easily be achieved if steps were taken to emulate the efforts to achieve such in athletics department of various universities . The report of the observations made on five athletics programs at the NCCA Division-I for a period of five months showed that such programs have managed to get the members from different...