[Willwhatley]

What a pity (well, not really) that race, whatever that is, is a false proxy for the diversity of outlook desired. What a shame it is far more likely to be shown by e.g.: personality type, communication style, preferred role in group dynamics, rich/poor, city/country, literate/numerate/ten other things, musical/not, and so on.

[rayiner]

It's a pretty decent proxy, unfortunately, given that you can't meet people before you interview them. Re: asians-

I went to a magnet high-school in the late 1990's, and at the time it was about 25% asian. My brother went there later, and by the time he finished (10 years after I had started) the demographics had skewed to 50%+ asian and the culture had changed dramatically. People were a lot less fun and a lot less outgoing, and a lot more intense and competitive.

When I went to law school I met a lot of fun, outgoing asians, so I don't want to paint things with too broad a brush, but honestly I wouldn't want my kid going to a school that was 50%+ asian. College is a time when kids should be getting socialized. Drinking, figuring out the opposite sex, even a little bit of risk taking are valuable in teaching people to navigate modern American society, and when you're surrounded by people whose parents spent 18 years telling them not to do any of those things I think you have an impoverished experience. Actually, when my brother was choosing between HYP and Caltech, I helped him lobby my parents for the former for precisely these reasons.

[hackinthebochs]

But it's not a false proxy; its a pretty good one. This country (America) is not as culturally homogeneous as some would like to think. Race correlates with this, especially when dealing with underrepresented minorities.

[JoeAltmaier]

Um, many of those are pretty commonly clustered by race. In America we have a diverse pool of folks, so we make up 'races' by skin color or whatnot. Under that system we see that race doesn't matter much; people vary all over the map.

But race in other parts of the globe correlate pretty much to culture, and personality, communications style, even socioeconomic group correlate strongly.