Journal for Pedagogy, Pluralism & Practice Home | Contact Us | Back Issues

What we have found is that in North Dakota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota - basically stable spaces with relatively little in and out migration - 55 to 60 percent of nineteen-year-olds have both graduated from high school and then went to a college. However, at the bottom of the scale, where only 25 to 30 percent of nineteen-year-olds will accomplish the American Dream, which is getting out of high school and getting admitted college, you have Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, the six most transient states in the United States, with the six highest crime rates. Crime and transiency go together as nothing else does. If you don't know your neighbor you might just as well steal his lawn mower.

Now notice New York, which is down quite far in this, but it's a great big state. Let's parse this into the three components. First of all, how about graduating from high school? You come up with about 15 if I recall and that means from 75 to 88 percent graduate from high school. So the numbers are much higher. But look at New York. New York is 41st on this crucial variable. New York has a super system of higher education and mediocre public schools. And there are a lot of very difficult issues in New York because it is after all a highly diverse state in terms of ethnic background and immigration. So that shows you of the two steps, this is the step where many states fall down - states that you won't expect to fall down as much as they do.

Next, if you graduate from high school what is the chance you will be able to go to college? This is where Massachusetts shines. In Massachusetts you find the best chances in the country for graduating from high school and then being admitted to college and right behind is New York. So on access to college, New York is the second best in the country. Whereas, in getting out of high school, it is the 41st. That tells you some very important things about the recruitment issue. You have to make sure that people have done two things. They would have to been born. You can't really recruit them unless they have been born. And the second thing is to make sure that they have graduated from high school. The last one, which is probably the most interesting for this recruitment conference, is to look at the chances that that a low-income student of whatever ethnic or racial original background, has to go to college. So in terms of equity and access Massachusetts has done a superb job but as I said you have to get out of high school in order to be eligible.

That's important because if you look at income barriers you find that in the lower income groups - and again, of any race - you can see that the level of effort that is required to get somebody to go to college in under-$25,000 households is very great and it has been, basically since 1979. One of the reasons for that was the federal decision to convert grants to loans. If you are going to Tuskegee and you get a grant, it means your family can still eat. If that is converted to a loan it means some terrible things for you and for your family and it may mean that they don't eat because the loans that liberal arts colleges graduates are coming out with now are $15,000 or more at their college graduation. That is enough for a down payment on a house. So any college graduate from a liberal arts college is sacrificing the right to put a down payment on a house within four years of graduation, because they have eaten that money up.

If we just look at some other things - let's take health insurance because that's important if you want to live long enough to get to go to college. Look at the states where you have the highest rates of people without health insurance and look at the states where you have the lowest rates. The lowest rates of people without health insurance are in the less transient states. It means that people in these states care for each other and talk to each other and know each other better. Highly transient states are places where you have the highest rates of people without health insurance. So a simple thing like the state in which a person is born can make a huge difference.

We have the most diverse system of higher education in the world partly because we have the most diverse population. If you knew the ways in which you can get from pre-school to the post-doctoral level, there is no other nation in the world that has as many routes. If you are forty years of age, your kids have finally moved out, and you have a chance to go back and get a high school diploma or a GED, can you do it in England? Absolutely not. Can you do it in France? Absolutely not. Can you do it in America? You can do it in four different ways. As you look at peoples' ability to get back into the system after they have gone out to work and have children, there is no other system quite like ours. That's why, as you think about recruiting minorities, you have to look at a variety of situations in which minorities might be ready to come back to more education.

I find this quite interesting about the community college. As we see, they have really captured a market. I did a report on this twelve years ago and now it's becoming a big idea: that we have a continuous sequence of education from preschool. It's not daycare anymore. It's preschool. That means it's a daycare where you learn your letters and numbers and how to get along with other people. And that's why daycare will become preschool. The transition from daycare to school is becoming a very important one and that's why kindergarten is the focus of so much work now and why so much research has been done showing that these first few years of life are absolutely crucial in terms of what you learn.

Then we have the transition from high school to college. We also have the after-life where you leave college and go to work our whatever your going to do. And now you have a set of other transitions around coming back to education in later years. Let's say you are teaching Moby Dick and you put an eighteen-year-old in that classroom and a fifty-year-old in that classroom. It's going to be two different experiences because when the older person hears Father Maple's sermon, they'll have a context that the eighteen-year-old simply won't have, regardless of how smart they are.

As we think about this, there was a transition in higher education that happened in about 1972 and by 1978 it became very clear that to develop a meaningful philosophy of life as a reason for going to college was in major decline and to make big bucks as fast as you can crossed that line right there. And since then the economic motives to go to college have been predominant and I think that's another thing you have to keep in mind when you are recruiting. A lot of the reasons we have difficulties with first generation children of immigrants is that they want to prove how good they are by making a lot of money. It's the American way. The grandchildren of the immigrants will be able to become teachers, nurses, doctors, and service-oriented people because now they have established that someone in their family has made the pile of money so the next generation can get into service occupations. And does it work in terms of big bucks? Look at educational level versus lifetime income. It's very clear that it works in a linear fashion. That is, the more education, the more money, without exception. In fact, this is so good you can pass it on to your children. If you look at who went to college based on wealth, it is very clear that as wealth goes up intelligence does not. The bell curve is absolutely gone but your chances go up. Your chances of moving up in the system works - knowing how to get it, knowing to take courses to train you to get better scores on that ridiculous test called the SAT, which actually does not predict freshman grades very well.

I was on the board of a university for twelve years and every year I asked the institutional research person to print out scores on the freshmen class, versus scores on their SAT's. We had a negative correlation every year. The higher the SAT's, the lower the college test scores. The institution prided itself in having a freshman year that so tough that no one could make it on their high school alone. And if you think about what makes you self-directed, what gives you a sense of motivation of willingness to work through failure, to see a larger set of issues in front of you, the SAT doesn't test any of that. And that is what determines the freshman year. But what it does predict beautifully is the household income. Every time you add ten thousand dollars to the household income of a SAT recruit you add 9 points to their math and verbal scores, without exception, all the way up and down the line. So it does predict something; it's just not the thing we thought it was.

Another thing to remember is that Americans are getting better educated. Just since 1990 we've had a fairly enormous increase of adults with a BA degree and that's just up now since 1999. However if you look at recruiting people out of high school, you have to face the fact that there is a increase coming through high school but not in K-8 because birth rates are now stabilized at about four million a year. And that means the future growth in the populations of those who will go to college at the age 18 are quite limited. And it means also I think if you look at college enrollment projections, you see what we really had at the baby boom was a really sharp curve upward and what we have now is a much easier curve to deal with because this is a really small percentage of people going out and much of that increase is people over 25. So what you begin to see is a different competitive market. You are one of four thousand institutions chasing almost 15 million students and the student body numbers in higher education are pretty good now, except among the minority population which has graduated from high school. This means that in most states now you have a sizeable economic benefit by recruiting minorities. Tuition is low in most of these institutions but if you look at the private four years, tuition is around $13,000 and that's enough to make that an impossible choice for many people.

Fifty-five percent of our students are female and that is an interesting thing to keep in mind. About 57 percent are full-time. That means that about 40 percent are a part-time and they are mostly in community college Two percent are foreign. Eighty percent are attending school in the state from which they graduated from high school. So most people go to college in the same state in which they graduated and that's terribly important if you're going to try to yank them out of Massachusetts in order to make them go someplace else. It's usually a failure. And the reason Massachusetts has such a superb reputation is that it's an input state. More people come to Massachusetts for higher education then leave Massachusetts to go other places.

So the future is that more students will finish their degree "late" and that's in quotes because the average now in America, according to the Yearbook from the Chronicle of High Education that comes out in the fall, is that it takes five years to complete a four-year program. That is now the median time to complete a BS or a BA degree in American higher education. More people will graduate from a secondary school. More people will graduate in a different major and that is terribly important because a lot of freshman and sophomores are changing majors as they go on. More students are going to be non-White because the White birth rate is below the placement level and more will be part-time, having jobs and families at the same time they are going to college. And many people will not want a degree. They will only want a course. As you get to 60 and 70-year-olds, this becomes a very important part of their life and frankly, the biggest cash cow over the next 20 years will be in that area. And we will see in a minutes just why that's going to be so important.

A lot of the admitted freshman say that they are going to go on for a master's degree because the BA is no longer enough to assure them of a middle class lifestyle and we've already mentioned the debts that people are piling up in the course of their career. If you look at progress by what's been made by Blacks - and we need to redraw this for Hispanics, but it's not quit done yet - and this scale is from 1971 to 1991, if you look at the completion of at least some college, you can see that Blacks are almost equal to Whites; not quite equal, still behind, but in high school completions, it's virtually the same. The problem is getting the degrees. Blacks are getting admitted to higher education but they don't have their degrees. This is partly because this is a fairly recent phenomenon and you haven't had enough time and also there is a high dropout rate among minorities in the sophomore and junior years of college. This has to be worked out but it does seem to me that access to college is no longer the crucial issue. The crucial issue is preparing minorities well enough so that they can graduate from college. Although as you saw, if you could just attend college for a while your income goes up over those who haven't. So this, I think, is a major achievement - that White and Black completion of high school are now virtually the same. And I think we need to get some credit for that. So we've got a large number of high school graduates now who are Black, lets say, and we'll talk about Hispanics more in a minute.

How do you recruit Blacks to college? First of all, be very careful. I was on the Newspaper Association of America Board for eight years and I just got off last year. This was our best ad; 'Yeah, I like rap and I like basketball, but I enjoy golf and classical music too. So you think I like fried chicken? Well sure, but I prefer lasagna. Drugs? Gangs? Get real. You don't know me so don't assume you do. All you know is I am Black." This ad went all around the country five years ago and just caused a revolution in marketing and businesses. It caused no changes in higher education whatsoever. But people in business started to realize what they would have to do to sell things to Blacks and that is to treat them differentially. There are a lot of different attitudes and cultures within the Black community; there isn't just one. So if you are recruiting you've got to remember that.

Astonishing, if you look at all racial and ethnic groups, you find that the number of males who get degrees in these various groups has been declining. There is nothing wrong with this, necessarily. I mean no one was concerned was the fact was that males got 70 percent of the degrees and females got 30 percent but now that it's turned around, it's become a little national crisis. There is a book on this called The Decline of Men, which is really quit interesting - a bit overstated but interesting nevertheless. But this does give you a sense that something is going on underneath the raw numbers and that for males, degree completion is declining.

You can also look at what people major in and again this is for Blacks. The number of Blacks interested in an education career has gone through a huge drop and social sciences remain as one of the major majors for them. If you look at Hispanics, you find pretty much the same thing. Education has seen a little drop and social and behavioral sciences are popular. The dropout rate for Hispanics in high school is very high but it is getting better and again if you look at Cuban dropout rates versus Mexican Americans, it's night and day. The Cuban rate is below that for Anglos and the Mexican American dropout rate is three times the national average. So if you are going to recruit from high school you have got to look at where high school enrollments are going up and in these states, high schools will increase.

So if you want to recruit high school graduates alone, you need to go to places where there are increases in K-12 enrollment. If you look at high school graduates you can see a lot of places that are behind and this is because of the baby boom. And some states are quite far ahead in high school graduates. If you look at those states and then go back down to elementary schools, you find considerable declines between the numbers graduating now from high school and what's coming through. If you build new high schools based on these numbers you'll have many empty high schools in fifteen years. So you've always got to look behind to see what's coming through and as you think about this and then look at minority high school graduates, you can see the two United States divided at the equator. One side is very heavily White and remains so. The other is very diverse and getting more diverse. If you look at the increases that are predicated, over 60 percent of which will be from of Hispanics and Asians in the next 20 years, you find that over 60 percent of those increases will be concentrated in particular regions.

Basically almost every state is consistent in that the number of colleges is equivalent to the percentage of the total United States population for that state. The only exception is Massachusetts. So the fact is that Massachusetts been a magnet for many years for people who wanted to come to the East - like me from Minnesota - to get a good college education at least on the graduate level. I couldn't afford Harvard as an undergraduate. I was admitted and couldn't afford to go, which humiliated my father. So I got a Ph.D. from Harvard, but he said, "Well that's nice but it would have been nicer for you if you could have gone as an undergraduate."

So now we can look at public institutions and as you move west you see a higher percentage of people going to public colleges and universities and a smaller percentage going to private institutions, largely because there aren't as many private institutes out here but also because of an attitude among state legislators in terms of who should be responsible for higher education. And as you move west, the state legislature begins to say more and more, "It's our responsibility to provide higher education," which is something that the Massachusetts legislature wanted desperately to avoid. So as you go west you begin to see more and more evidence that it has to be in the hands of the state legislature and the land grant colleges were a major factor in pushing that along as you move to the west.

If you look at full-time students you can see that again, the larger the number of community colleges, the smaller the number of people going full-time. And his is really quite interesting if you begin to look at where community colleges are really strong and you can see that lot of these students are basically mid-career people who desire more technical training to get a better job. That's one of the major reasons why some states have such a small percentage of full-time enrollees. You can also look at people in four-year institutions directly, should you want to, and here you can see pretty much the same thing. These are the sates in which you find community colleges that are not as strong and four-year programs do tend to leave more to graduate study, but you tend to go out of state for graduate study whereas you do not go out of state for the undergraduate program. You tend to stay in the state you got your high school diploma from. So that is Higher Ed. 101 and there are a lot of recruiting implications for what we have just been talking about.

Let's talk now just for a minute about demographics 101 and we will go to the census. So here we are in 1946 with a 37 percent increase in births, including President Clinton. Now they couldn't be born in maternity wards. Who is going to build 37 percent more maternity wards based on a rumor? As a result, you go back to the literature of that period - 1947 or so - and you find pictures of babies. They are in cafeterias. They are in waiting rooms. They are in telephone booths. There's a picture in Life Magazine of a newborn baby in a bassinet in a phone booth. Why? Because there were no maternity wards to handle the 37 percent population increase that that one year generated. Who is going to build that based on no facts at all?

Well the story of the baby boomer's life is that never has this society built facilities in advance of your needs for them. And that is why 18 years later - President McKenna is quite right - I was yelling my head off for four years saying, "Look at what's coming through the sophomore year of high school! It's a 37 percent increase and they are going to want to go to college." No, they won't want to go to college. And they certainly won't want to go to our unique college with our unique faculty and curriculum. And then they have a 37 percent increase in applications. And for that reason, they turned down a lot of people, which was fine. They enjoyed rejecting people. And it was in those years that the status symbol became, "How many people did you reject?" Selectivity today even means, to some extent, how many people did you accept of the pool that came to you? And of course to be really good is to have nobody but really smart people apply, but then you aren't really selective at all.

So it is interesting how that started. But then came admission to college. Then came entry-level jobs. Then came promotions, and nobody ever expanded 37 percent as you came along and that's why I think the ultimate issue is going to be - another one of my clients which is three hundred funeral home directors - trying very hard to figure out what kind of a funeral you would like. It's just fascinating to interview baby boomers. President Clinton was born in 1946, so he turned 50 in 1996. The math in this is not very hard, but it's very accurate because people age ten years per decade, so you can really predict these things with great speed. So you know if you turn 50 in1996 that means in 2006 your going to turn 60 and that's when the mortality rate begins to move up, although not very much because we have done so much with life expectancy. Therefore, it is appropriate for people to begin thinking of that all the time.

But what President Clinton and his colleagues did was to begin an embarrassingly long 17-year long celebration of the ending of World War II, which was overdone. I mean we don't need to celebrate the ending of World War II. Look at the baby boom after World War I. I mean that's under control. You celebrate and you get on with it. This is simply Californian in terms of what's going on. So here is a bunch of people, who throughout their entire life, there will never be enough of what they want because of the 37 percent increase that kicked this whole thing off. So to separate yourself off from everyone else, you buy a certain kind of Jean and then you buy a certain kind of car, like an SUV, thinking, "Now I'm the only with an SUV," and tomorrow two million other people your age have done the same thing. So this preoccupation with identity, I think, is unique to this group and I have a lot of sympathy with that problem.

I was born in 1931. Almost nobody else was. I would love to meet people my age but I can't even find them. Being born in 1931, I remember the race of the depression a little bit. When I was in fourth grade I remember walking into school and in this classroom there were four kids. I was the fifth. The teacher burst into tears and gave me the biggest hug I have ever had, bigger my mother ever did and she was a good hugger. The reason for that was that five kids allowed the teacher to have a class that "made." She would be paid with five students. With four, the class would be canceled and she would loose her ability to support her family. You could not imagine how grateful that woman was to me. I mean I didn't do anything except show up. But that's basically all I needed, so this is a very different pattern. I have not spent a day of my life that I can recall, pondering that nature of my own identity. And indeed I have enjoyed getting older. I turned 70 about four weeks ago now and had a little party with my funny best friends and my wife gave me a toast and said, "It's not that you forget things, it's that you remember things that never happened."

And if you look at 30-year-olds now, they will be people born in or about 1970's. So when you look at the 1970's what you see is the first generation after this decline. It's the 30-year-olds who get catered to by the community colleges and others working with adult education so far because they haven't yet thought about what 50 and 60-year-olds need. What you see is a steady increase in 30-year-olds moving into those particular years. So that looks pretty good.

When we think of the baby boom we almost always think of people like this, when they were younger and this is when they decided not to have children. Some of you may remember this: Two baby boomers blowing bubbles on a Saturday night and a woman is saying, "I find the whole idea of pregnancy repugnant and I'm not wild about children." And if you look at baby boomers today as presented in the media, you have Clinton as the quinexxential baby boomer. He objected to the war. He experimented with drugs (although he didn't inhale). He got as educated as he could. He married a professional woman and they have one child. And that is why the baby boom isn't really reproducing itself, because so many baby boomers have not married and so many or them have not had children. But notice that they are White. Where's the Black baby boom? Well there wasn't a Black baby boom. Oh yes, there was.

Look at the Black population rates during the same years of the White baby boom and the increase was actually greater for Blacks then it was for Whites. We have a huge Black middle class today and that is almost entirely as a result of Black fertility during the same period. There is one difference. If you look at the parents who created this baby boom among Blacks, that is the last group of really poorly educated Black people we have had in this country. If you look at the people who produced the boom, 8 percent of them had a high school diploma. Of their children, 75 percent have high school diplomas, and if you look at today's high school graduates it's 89 percent of Blacks who get the high school diplomas. So the shift for Blacks between the pre-baby boom and the boom itself was even greater then Whites, in terms of providing access to the middle class. I am not saying its sweetness and light and that there are no issues there. I'm saying we need to look very carefully at what happens when you let a group get on the escalator. What happens is that now we have 20 percent of Black households with a higher income then the White average. Again a higher percent of Black kids are poorer then White kids. We need not forget that, but we do need to suggest that when a group can get started on the escalator, we all benefit by having a large middle class. And Hispanics are moving in that direction very rapidly.

So our future is a little increase in school age kids, a drop in 18 to 44-years-olds, which wipes out the increase in kids. And if you look at older people, older workers and over 65, you have a 23 million increase here balancing a zeroing out of young people. That means the country gets older very rapidly and we have more retirees and a smaller percentage of workers, which basically is happening to all our Europeans allies, as well as Japan. The population birth rate is not enough to sustain the current population level. This is what I call the Palm Beach affect. In America the average person is 36 and in Palm Beach the average person is 51. The fertility rate of people over 51 is not worth calculating. What you have in Palm Beach then is a population that is not having enough babies to continue the population at that level and that means that young families with children must move into Palm Beach or the population will decline. And young people with children do not have enough money to live in Palm Beach, so that's the Palm Beach affect.

If you look ahead you can already see that the Hispanic population is bigger then the Black population and that was the biggest surprise from the census 2000 but it was entirely predictable four years before through something call the current population survey, which is done every year. The increase of Native Americans, which is going to be much higher then an increase of Asian, is a percentage growth that is quite considerable. And Hispanics added almost 10 million versus five million up for Whites and that's the last increase for Whites that you will see. And notice the term "non-Hispanic Whites" because Whites are usually double counted as Hispanic because about 80 percent of Hispanics think that they are White. Asians and Hispanics are going to be 61 percent of out population growth - 44 percent Hispanic and 17 percent Asian. There will be an increase in Black growth too but not immigration. So the Black growth is only in fertility and that makes a huge difference but look where they are going to go.

As I said earlier, California will add 12 million Hispanics and 6 million Asians, just to that one state. If you add Texas and Florida, you add 8 million more Hispanics. Native Americans are going to go from 2 million to 3.4 million and you cannot explain that by fertility. They cannot have that many babies. What is happening here is that it is now socially acceptable to admit to your Native American heritage. Many of us, including me, have Native American bloodlines. President Clinton is part Cherokee. He has never been able to say that until the 2000 census because for the first time, you could describe who you really were and most of us are from complex amalgam of many different sources in our background, to put it as lightly as I can. This, I think, suggests a whole new view of what we mean when we say that we are going to recruit minorities and we will spend our last ten minutes on that.

If you are looking for where immigrants came from in the 1820's to the 1945 period, ranked by how many came, you can see it is virtually all Europe. The only exception there is a large Chinese group that came largely to built the railroads and then in 1888 the congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act - one of the really mean things we have ever done - because of newspapers are talking about the yellow peril and too many Asians here, especially Chinese. And they are not yellow. I mean nobody is yellow except for people with jaundice. So what we did was to say, "Go home. And if we gave you American citizenship it is hereby rejected. It was a mistake. We're sorry but we are rescinding your citizenship." So we have done some pretty awful things in the name of immigration but this is basically who came. Look who is coming here now. It is everybody except Europe. So the job here was to replace an older Italian with a younger Italian. That's is hard but not impossible. The job now is to replace the older Italian with the younger Korean. That's different.

Racial harmony has always meant Black and White getting along together in the United States. And the Gallop survey every year shows that 60 percent of American White adults have a good Black friend and about 50 percent of Blacks say the same thing: that they have a good White friend. That is no longer the issue. The issue is how many Blacks have a good Hispanic friend? How many Whites have a good Asian friend? And those of the questions of the next 20 years and that is where your role, I think, is going to be so critical as we work on that problem because that is a more complex and a more interesting issue.

So there are four things that produce change. One is babies and if your look at differential fertility, you can see that Black females get pregnant 5.1 times over her lifetime and gives birth to 2 and half children. That is enough to push the Black group up slightly. Hispanics get pregnant less often and give birth to more children and that is interesting, whereas Whites are now getting pregnant 2.8 times sand 1.7 children is the result for Whites. So differential fertility has something to do with change. We have about 4 million births per year. There are one million immigrants, and 43 million of us move every year. So if you want to know what changes things, it isn't birthrates. It isn't immigration. It is how many people move from Arizona to Colorado. That is what defines the future of this nation, in some very important ways. So this is one component of what you need to look at as you look all around.

Ten states have most of the Asian population and another way to think about it is that the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, have 49 percent of the Asians in American. Nothing is distributed equally and remember, the variety within Hispanics and within Asians. Connie Chung does not consider herself to be an Asian. She is Chinese. Her heritage is Chinese. She is not Korean and she wants to maintain her heritage and that is an issue we will have to deal with also within the next twenty years. Not only do ten states have 90 percent of the Hispanic population in the United States, but four states have seventy percent of them. So you see again that concentrations are one thing but distributions across the United States are something else and that is what we really need to talk about.

We are now 281 million people and this graph gives you an idea on how far it is from California to the smallest states. I mean the fact that all of them have two senators gives one pause just briefly, to think about that. So that is the overall. We can now look at who gained politically. This shows you the political climates and that means a number of states have a new task, which we are just entering now, that is the redrawing of electoral boundaries for purposes of electing people for the House. You can see which states have a republican majority and you can see which have a democratic majority. You can see that those in which there is no majority and those are the ones that are really interesting, because they may fight to the death.

Although this is not our current topic, I will just show you this one figure, which is funny. Here are two districts. The first District A is in Fort Worth the second District B is in Dallas. They are about 30 miles apart. This was considered constitutional. It's 91 percent White and 72 percent republican and the Supreme Court declared that this is constitutional. Sandra Day O'Conner wrote the deciding opinion. In District B, it is 50 percent Black and 70 percent democratic and it was considered unconstitutional. The opinion was written by Judge Sandra Day O'Conner. And then the final question for politics is, "How we make the house bigger?" It hasn't been made bigger since 1910, when a member represented 210,000 people. Today it is 572,000 and 630,000 after the census 2000, which is about right. How do we make it the house bigger? There is no mechanism anywhere in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the writings of Thomas Jefferson. There is no place where you can find out how to change the size of the House of Representatives. They will voluntarily have to vote to give up power and to add a hundred members, which will basically ruin their funds.

So what happened with the 2000 census? Some states disproportionately gained citizens. It is not just fertility. It is out migration. The state with the highest median in age is Florida because older people have moved to Florida. The second oldest is west Virginia, because younger people left West Virginia, leaving nothing but older people in their rocking chairs, getting older at the rate 10 years per decade. It's highly predictable.

If we also look at populations, you can see something interesting and that is the Black population is 12 percent but if you look through this list, which is what you usually get from the census, you will see that there is no "Hispanic" and the reason for that is that Hispanic is not a race. It is an ethnic group. What is an ethnic group? Look U.S. Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Directive 15, which is the operator's manual for the census. It is never mentioned. Hispanic is an ethnic group but how do you define an ethnic group? There is no definition. And addition, in the second paragraph of OMB's Directive 15, which runs the census, you will find this statement, which I have committed to memory: "The racial categories used in the census have no scientific validity." That is a direct comment from OMB's Director on how to use the census.

So now we are facing this most interesting issue and now that we have a little bit bigger Hispanic population than Black population, there is a little sniping going on between NAACP and LaRaza. In addition, there is some very good stuff, I believe, happening and that is a new group called the Alliance, which was in San Antonio yesterday when I was there to talk to different group. This is the Tribal Colleges of America, which represents the 120 Hispanic colleges and universities and the 114 traditionally Black institutions, finally getting together to try to accomplish things, jointly. The Congress has gotten so good at playing one off against the other, that they finally realized, "What if we all go in representing people of color," - which they really can't anymore but it's okay - and try to get something good for minorities. And to my mind, that is where we are going and we should not pick these groups apart in the press and on television and I am afraid that might happen.

If you look at the suburban Black population, you can see again, that many places in the United States it is now normal for Blacks to get educated, move to the suburbs, and have their kids not just go to college, but to have their kids go to Princeton. And the difference in being in an outer ring suburb and being in an inner ring suburb is that if you are in an outer ring suburb, you know that you want your kids to go to the best institutions. So 7 million people answered the census for the first time - you were never able to do this before - that they were of mixed ethnic ancestry. And eventually that will change everything. Notice that it's 1.9 percent of adults and 4.2 percent of kids. The youngest populations of America are the most diverse. However you define diversity, the youngest people will have the most of it. And of course they will grow up, in years predicting, and eventually they will be going to college too. We have six racial categories in the 1990 census. There are 63 combinations in the new one. And I testified before the House and Senate on this issues two years ago along with 3 other people.

Tiger Woods is a Cablinasian. He is Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian. How do you score those four? Does each one count for precisely one quarter of Tiger Woods' heritage and who figured that out? Do we go back to quadroons and octoroons, which is what we did earlier in our census history? How are we going to figure out what we call Tiger Woods? Can Tiger Woods be White for housing surveys and Black for affirmative action purposes? And the answer is, "Yes." The Office of Civil Rights had decided, as soon as the census said they were going to do this, that if you have one drop of Black blood you are Black for civil rights reinforcement purposes. That is exactly the same standard the slave owners used to decide who would become of slave. One drop of Black blood leaves you Black and made you a slave. So it is interesting that the percent, which now guarantees equal freedom, is the same percentage that made them slaves over a hundred years ago.

This is an interesting issue but then how about the civil rights of Hispanics, who are not a race. Are they a protected class under the rules? The answer is, "No." So there are some issues here we really need to work on. At the Brown v. Board of Education anniversary in Topeka, Kansas a couple years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking. There was an audience of 500 people and about 470 were Black. The question that I raised was, "Is Brown v. Board of Education for Blacks only or for any group that is segregated?" And the answer on a hand vote was that 400 people said it's for Blacks. Now I can understand that and they came up afterwards to say, "Look, we fought for this and we died for this." Some others died too but the issue is very important now as we look at Hispanics who are in more segregated schools than Blacks everywhere and who have a slightly higher poverty rate than Blacks do. What do we own them through the Office of Civil Rights? And I think those are going to be very interesting and important questions and it behooves us all to think about them a little more.

So the census is actually a public opinion poll. If you say you are Black, you're Black. Race is terribly important, politically, economically, and historically but it is scientific, non-science and it has always been. Thomas Jefferson, our first census director, had in his categories, slaves and mulattos because Jefferson observed that slaves often had lighter skin color than their owners. So this ambiguity about race has been around basically since the beginning but now we are able to show it. If you look at people who checked Native American alone or in combination with another race, you see this enormous shift as people begin to say, "Well yes, there is some Native American heritage in my heritage too." And President Clinton actually checked that he was part Cherokee. The question is still how do you score that and whether each is fifty-fifty or how that works out. But you can see a big increase in Native Americans in a sample group of states and that this increase was more for combinations, than it basically was for members of a single tribe. And I think that's got a lot of implications too.

If you look at the children of immigrants who are Hispanic, you find that the children are marrying non-Hispanics, 35 percent of the time. For Asians, it's the same thing. Children of Asian immigrants are marrying non-Asians almost 50 percent of the time. For Whites it's 4 and 3 and for Blacks it's 8 and 4 but those numbers are cause for considerable doubt. If you look at what's happened to the European American population - I know European American sounds funny but in 1900, you could have used that term if we had hyphenated everything as we do now. In fact, when Kermit the Frog - one of my favorite people - applied for citizenship, they had him apply as an Amphibian American. If you look at European Americans today, only 15 percent are an Italian married to and Italian, a German married to a German, and so forth. We assimilate by marrying people of different backgrounds. It's now, all of a sudden, socially acceptable to talk about that. And there are some wonderful books about this; Jim McBrides book, The Color of Water. Many good things are happening in terms of being able to talk about this within a family.

Every time we've had a census count, we've changed the categories and that will probably continue because now you can have combinations, which you could never have before. In 1960, you were White or anything else. Calling someone a "non-White" is to define them by a quality that they don't have, which is bad social science and not the best ethics either. What if the sex question had been, "Are you male or non-male?" You can image the furor and yet that's exactly how many people felt about being called "non-White." In 1970, you could White, Black, or Other, which was a step ahead and in 1980, you could finally be Hispanic. There were no Hispanics in 1970. The term had not been invented yet. It was invented by the census to describe the big wave of immigration coming from South and Central America. But in the newspapers and magazines in the 70's, you will never see any reference to Hispanics. They did not exist. Even today there are no Hispanics anywhere except in the United States. If you live in Spain, you are not a Hispanic. The term leaves a lot to be desired in terms of precision in exactly what it means.

As we think about people of color, let's remember that if skin color were really a definitive definition of race, you'd have melanin distributed this way. Melanin is the only skin protein there is. Instead, it's like this. So as you think about recruiting minorities, let's remember that the census has done this four times now where the darkest quarter of the White population is darker on a light meter than the lightest quarter of the Black population. At some stage we need to admit that race is scientific nonsense. It's very important but it's not scientific and that's one of the things we have to think about when we are going to recruit minorities.

A majority of Americans think it's good for people to call themselves "multiracial" if that's what they are but if you look at it by age again, the younger the person, the more they think it's okay because they are more likely to know a multiracial person. Today's high school kids are very unusual and I think you need to have cautious optimism, based on what they are doing because of the fact that 2.5 million of them signed a pledge saying that they are going to withhold sex until marriage. Can you image that in the 1960's? You would have been laughed out of the hall. In addition to that, you find that over half of them say that they have a good friend of another racial or ethnic background. They are making friendships across a broader range of ethnic groups than anyone else ever has. So I find cautious optimism in this idea. These are kids that have very little concern for national issues because of the way we present it to them in the newspapers and on television. But they are very concerned with local issues. Sixty percent of them volunteer and to my mind, this looks like a very interesting generation because they know people who are multiracial.

Then you think of the 3 million children in our schools who are mixed. Hannah, when she was four, applied for kindergarten and the person in charge asked her race. She broke into tears and said, "I can't choose between my mommy and my daddy," who were right behind here and her father's a lawyer. Four cases have held that you may not ask someone to choose between their mother's and father's heritage. To my mind, this is one of the most interesting things that has happened - when the law gets ahead of itself and does something, I think, really good. It was based not on First of Fifth Amendment rights but on equal protection under the laws. The court said if Hannah chooses her mom, she looses her father's protection and vice versa. This is a very interesting and valid argument but look at these people. They have two things in common. Number one, they are all famous. You know their pictures. And number two, they are all of mixed ancestry. Now a lot of these are entertainers and athletes but here's Linda, a pundit, almost a cabinet member, an astronaut, a senator, all kinds of people from very different walks of life and they are all mixed. I had the pleasure of meeting this young lady last year. She does the Today Show on the weekends and her name is Solidad O'Brien. Think of the mileage in her name.

So as we think about the future based on what the census is going to do to us and for us, this is the first time we can say who we really are and it's complicated and confusing but Lesley University will have to fill out 63 different boxes on your students' racial characteristics if you want any federal money. And it will be easier to you to do than for the average superintendent of public schools, who will have to do the same thing. If you add Hispanics to the category, you run it up to about 106. So, if we're all marrying other people from different backgrounds, which is how we melt, what would we look like, let's say in 70 years? Think of all the lips, all the eyes, all the noses, all the hair, and all the women in world, put them on one person and what would she look like? Well, she'd look like this. I must confess, if most women looked like that, it's not a great loss. She's quite attractive. And if you want to see this woman, there his one place in America where she is 60 percent of the audience walking by you and that is in the Miami airport. Go there and count females as they go by. I've had many cancelled flights in Miami and I've had nothing else to do. This woman just leaps out at you. She's basically everywhere.

But the focus groups that Time did on this face are even more fascinating. When Whites look at this face, they say unanimously that she is White. Blacks look at the face and say she's Black. Asians look at it and say she's Asian. Hispanics look at it - with no skin color justification at all - they look at it and say she's Hispanic. Native Americans look at it and say she's not Native American; she's Navaho. So what really matters is not the face. What matters is what we bring to that face every day as we make decisions based on the people flying past us every day because of the 43 million people who move and we begin to say, "What's that person like," and then we look at color and various kinds of facial designations. In total violation of Martin Luther King suggested, we do.

And why do we do it? Why don't we judge people by the content of their character instead of by the color of their skin? Because it's quicker. And if someone is walking past you and you'll never see them again, in this transient society, you have to make a judgment about that person's worth and you can do it very easily based on physical characteristics. We can keep on doing that if we would like but it does seem to me that we might want to consider that being Black or Asian is not universally handicapping because of the things we have already talked about. Whereas being poor is a universal handicap. We thought that racial desegregation would result in economic desegregation. In Louisville, Kentucky, when we desegregated the schools, within the poverty groups in downtown Louisville, they are exactly as they were before, but the kids went to integrated schools. That did not change the economic picture and as far as economic desegregation is concerned, that's probably the next big step. Kentucky was actually sued by 14 rural districts that claimed that they could never provide the amount of money per student that Louisville suburbs could and that that was against the state's constitution. It was proven to be correct and the schools were ordered to raise 2 billion dollars that they would use to equalize the educational resources for rural kids with those of suburban kids. That's economic desegregation. It's a logical step that follows from racial desegregation and how we move from one to the other, I think, is the question of the next 30 years.