U of I Criticized for low minority enrollment

Little article from yesterday's Southern (no link that I have found for the story, but here is a link to the source), the story was opposite the comics. They are claiming that U of I doesn't enroll enough minorities. Their numbers are 12.8% of the students are minorities and 27% of Illinois graduating high school seniors are minorities. I liked the quotes at the end of the story, "Chancellor Richard Herman (of U of I) took issue with the report, saying it should have compared the school's minority student population with the percentage of high school graduates qualified enough to be accepted to the campus." Also "If you look at the minority population in the state ... the simple truth is that not all of them go on to college, " Chancellor Richard Herman of U of I.

I got a kick out of the little source report that I provided a link to and their comment about UC Berkeley "received high marks for attracting low-income students." I'm not sure about the other universities they list with good access to minorities or low income students, but Berkeley's low-income students can be directly attributed to California's large number of Asian immigrants. Those Chinese and Vietnamese parents produce kids that are great students while working as janitors and cooks. But those immigrant kids aren't counted as minorities, I guess because they are doing to well?

I have written this before, but don't you wonder what would happen if all the poor kids in Southern Illinois had Jewish, Chinese or Vietnamese parents? They would be reading by the age of 5, blowing out the school GPA's and going to the best colleges within one generation. It is all about the parents. We see the immigrant Asian parents here too, and their kids are kicking butt and taking names. I guess we can't train them when they are adults and it is all hopeless? Anyone know, can you train poor parents to do this?

I also wonder if we aren't seeing lies, damn lies and statistics from "The Education Trust" people. They must know the problem is in the parents and preK-12 system, the universities are using reverse discrimination to help more minority and poor kids into the schools with better financial assistance. What exactly can you do about parents who don't have enough self discipline or cultural roll models to push their kids to success?