Compared with freshmen in the United States as a whole, Penn's class of 2012 is more ethnically and geographically diverse, according to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions' Web site.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's recent poll, which surveyed first-year full-time students at four-year universities, depicted predominantly white, middle-class freshmen studying within roughly 100 miles of their hometowns.
Penn and other top universities emphasize the geographic and ethnic diversity of the overall student body. Penn's class of 2012 illustrates this emphasis, with nearly 25 percent of freshmen of Asian descent, compared with less than eight percent nationally.
While Penn's numbers for Latino and black students are more comparable to national figures, the white population is a 12-percent smaller portion of the freshman class than the national average.
While merely having an ethnically diverse student body is no guarantee that people of different ethnicities will interact, College freshman and Class of 2012 Vice President Shri Chauhan said he finds Penn inclusive. As an Indian American, falling into a predominantly Indian group would have been easy, he said, but instead he has developed a diverse group of friends. He added that diversity at Penn is "not a cliche."
College freshman Jon Torem agreed. Diversity "adds to a better living environment because you learn from different people and cultures," he said.
Still, Janice Dow, College sophomore, Daily Pennsylvanian opinion artist and United Minorities Council vice chairwoman, said "self-segregation" can be an issue. The UMC works to rectify this by "promoting collaboration among dissimilar [student] groups," she said.
Chauhan also agreed that Penn lacks political diversity. He said everyone "jumped on the bandwagon for Barack Obama," and The Daily Pennsylvanian's November 2008 poll confirmed this, with 80.3 percent of students supporting Obama compared with 13.5 percent for John McCain.
Although the Chronicle's recent poll did not ask students about support for a particular candidate, it identified about 21 percent of freshmen as conservative, 43 percent as moderate and 31 percent as liberal - the largest percentage since 1973.
College junior Euhana Ossi, a residential adviser in the Harrison College House Freshman Experience residential program, said the class of 2012 is not particularly different from previous classes.
However, she said this year's freshmen seem particularly "open to new cultures and perspectives."
Harrison House Dean Frank Pellicone also said, in terms of the criteria in the Chronicle's study, Penn's class of 2012 was not very different from previous ones.
Rather, Pellicone emphasized the intangibles, describing how in his nine years at Penn, students have increasingly communicated with their families.
Younger students are not as accustomed to independence, he said, which he attributed to cell phones and other forms of communication not previously available.
