Out of all the institutions included in the study, the University was found to have the highest share of Hispanic students. | Trevor Nolley/The Cougar
The University ranked eighth out of 98 large public universities and 15th out of 550 public, four-year colleges and universities for racial and ethnic diversity, according to a recent study conducted by HeyTutor.
Utilizing data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System, the study looked at race, ethnicity and citizenry at each institution to generate a diversity index calculation. The University earned a score of 75.40.
“I feel like the diversity of the University serves as an asset, because every day you get to experience new cultures,” said Council for Cultural Activities Director Eduardo Abrams.
The study found that the University is composed of 24.1 percent white students, 34.2 percent Hispanic students, 10 percent black students and 22 percent Asian students. Out of all the institutions included in the study, the UH was found to have the highest share of Hispanic students.
The University of Texas at Austin ranked 50th with a score of 71.86, while Texas A&M College Station ranked 220th with a score of 55.69 and had the highest percentage of white students, with 61.7 percent of students who identify as white.
UH, as well as other schools included in the HeyTutor study, were grouped into cohorts based on the size of the student population: institutions with over 20,000 students made up one group, schools with between 5,000 and 20,000 students compose another and schools with less than 5,000 compose another.
Across the colleges and universities included in the study, the diversity index ranges from 79.24 to 7.02. Institutions with higher diversity indexes have greater equality in the distribution of students across varying racial and ethnic groups, while schools with lower diversity indexes tend to have a single race or ethnicity that makes up the student body.
The release of the HeyTutor study comes a couple of months after UH was ranked 8th in campus ethnic diversity among national universities by the U.S. News and World Report.
One of the ways that the University promotes cultural awareness and diversity is through CCA, which offers support to registered student organizations and events related to culture and diversity.
“We don’t want to be the office that puts on cultural events because we have ‘culture’ in our name,” Abrams said. “We are more about, ‘this is our culture, this is why we embrace it, this is why we want to celebrate it.’ ”
