multicultural cities essay

The Advantages of Living in a Multicultural City Essay

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Introduction

Works cited.

The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, said, “We are going forward with the idea of multicultural, multinational state, trying to live in unity, at the same time respecting our diversity…But we need to all come together so we can live united” (“20 Quotes Praising Cultural Diversity.”). Today, it is not unusual to see people of all races, ethnic backgrounds, or cultural groups living in one city. For some people, living in multicultural environments makes them feel uncomfortable because they do not want to integrate into another culture.

However, it can not be denied that living in a multicultural city can teach people a lesson that they were previously learning only through books, news, or the internet. Living in a multicultural city provides one with multiple benefits such as having opportunities to learn about other cultures, developing a better understanding of different cultures, and having more chances to improve one’s personality.

First, living in a multi-cultural environment gives more options to know and understand other cultures. The culture is further enriched by the influx of immigrants from over the world who all come to live in one city. People can find out differences in traditions, food, appearance, and personal habits when they live in a city with different cultures. For instance, in America, while talking, people can completely disagree with the opinion of the opponent and make constructive contributions.

However, in Asian counties, people are less likely to show their disagreements. By meeting people from other cultures, one has the opportunity to learn about such nuances and be more respectful of the differences of other people. This knowledge can later help a person in his or her travels around the world. By becoming culturally aware through daily interactions with representatives of other cultures, one could adapt more easily when visiting their home countries. Having such an understanding of cultural nuances prevents people from situations where one may offend another with a careless gesture or word.

In addition to that, living side by side with other nations builds tolerance in people. All countries and cultures have negative and positive sides, things that they could do better. By going to the same school, college, using public transport, eating in restaurants, and doing other things as parts of one society, people learn how to be mindful of other cultures. Differences can at times cause problems and misunderstandings but through frequent daily communication, they may be bridged. No doubt that becoming a better person will require lots of strength and resilience, but in a multicultural city, it can be achieved easier than in a monocultural one.

People can learn different languages when they live in a multicultural city. There is no better and more effective way to learn a language than to be immersed in a culture that they are trying to learn. Of course, it could be better to visit a home country of the language one is trying to learn but it is not always possible and maybe financially burdening. Living in a city where there may be a community of native speakers is a much cheaper way to achieve proficiency in a foreign language. One can even make new acquaintances and friends while communicating and learning how to speak in a different language, which is another bonus of the multicultural cities.

According to some of the researchers, Los Angeles is one of the most multicultural cities in the world populated by representatives of around 140 countries speaking 86 different languages (Teixeira 450). Los Angeles created a truly exciting cultural scene. It is filled with cultural neighborhoods such as Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, or Thai-town. For example, the area of a city where many Chinese people live and where you can find many Chinese shops and restaurants is called Chinatown.

People go there because they want to explore the culture, food, traditions, and other peculiarities of the Chinese nation. Such cultural variety allows people to imitate traveling to multiple other countries and learn their ways while staying within one city. It is incredibly convenient, cheap, and exciting.

Living in multicultural cities enables people to have more opportunities to develop their personalities. Immersed in the intercultural environment, they can meet more people who are unlike them. It not only exposes them to different cultures and alternative ways of doing things, but it also helps broaden their horizons. Language and culture forces people to perceive things differently which creates an opportunity to share and compare views on the world. For example, the concepts of family and friendship can be a broad topic for discussion and mutual exchange of views. It is believed that the more points of view a person could understand and accept the broader his or her worldview. Cultural awareness in understanding different things makes a person more sensitive to other people.

People raised in multicultural cities can become better diplomats as they know how to communicate effectively with representatives of other cultures. Simply living in a city might not necessarily make a person a better diplomat, but it can help develop tolerance and understanding of different nations. Diplomats and ambassadors as people who frequently deal with negotiations and talks at the international level can benefit from such a multicultural experience.

All things considered, living in a multicultural city is better than in a monocultural one because people can learn other cultures, languages, bridge differences in understanding, become a better person and broaden one’s horizons. It is also a cheap and easy way to immerse oneself in a cultural environment without actually visiting another country. In a monocultural city, there is no way of knowing about other cultures besides books, news, and the internet, while in a multicultural one there is an opportunity of talking to the representatives of other countries. This enables cross-cultural exchange, builds tolerance, and facilitates mutual understanding between nations within cities.

Teixeira, Carlos. “Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles, by Mohammad Abdul Qadeer.” Journal of Urban Affairs , vol. 40, no. 3. 2018, pp. 449–51.

“ 20 Quotes Praising Cultural Diversity. ” University of Florida International Center, n.d. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, June 17). The Advantages of Living in a Multicultural City. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-advantages-of-living-in-a-multicultural-city/

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IvyPanda . 2021. "The Advantages of Living in a Multicultural City." June 17, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-advantages-of-living-in-a-multicultural-city/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Advantages of Living in a Multicultural City." June 17, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-advantages-of-living-in-a-multicultural-city/.

Bibliography

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• Student Life

Perks and challenges of life in a multicultural city

‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’ — Samuel Johnso n

London is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world with foreigners constituting about a third of its almost 9 million inhabitants . Whether you’re walking down the street, sitting in the bus or out shopping in Sainsbury, you’re bound to hear different languages being spoken around you — from French to German, Arabic, Swahili or Mandarin.

Living in a city with people from different ethnic and racial and economic backgrounds, one needs to be aware of and sensitive to the cultural differences to navigate and maintain healthy relations with neighbors, classmates or co-workers.

The multicultural population in London represents a modern cosmopolitan city — a progressive, dynamic and tolerant space where everyone can express themselves (as long as its legal of course) For a young person, living in London can be exciting because of the dynamic socio-cultural environment with its myriad of options when it comes to food, culture and entertainment.

Your flatmate, neighbor or colleague could be from anywhere in the world, making it possible to make friends from different ethnicities, religions and backgrounds. A friend described living in London as the cheapest way to travel — you could be talking about a beach in Barbados with someone you met or get tips on skiing in Norway over lunch with another person. All it takes is talking to people. Interacting with different people will give you exposure to the world’s diversity in a way that no book can ever explain.

Another interesting observation is that although London is full of strangers, you never really feel like a stranger. There’s an odd comfort in knowing that you’re not the only one who’s new to the city and even though we are all different, we’re all the same.

However, while it’s great to live in such a multicultural city, it does come with its challenges.

The sense of community and connectivity with people can be short-lived or barely existent. People move to London for different reasons — some are studying, others come to find work making London a transitory city with people moving in and out at different stages of their lives. Undergraduate and doctoral students have about three years to integrate and establish that sense of community while pursuing their studies. University societies and groups are one way of establishing relations with people with similar interests.

Students pursuing their post-graduate degrees face a greater challenge as most of the programs are just a year long. Having to balance studying and working while navigating through cultural differences can be frustrating and it’s quite likely that after a whole year of being in London, you will find yourself with one or two friends.

Living in a city that can best be described as a melting pot of cultures has a great influence on the construction of identity — won’t be the same person after living in London for a a few months or years. There are many stimuli that will challenge your values, your beliefs, your mind set. It’s easy to lose yourself and identity crisis is a reality. This is important, considering that as we grow older, tend to become more set in our ways, in our beliefs — changing is not easy. Brace yourself for conversations with people who do not share the same belief or values you have. Open your mind to try and see the world from another person whose experiences are vastly different from yours.

So whether you’re looking to moving to London, or you’re already here, here’s what you need to survive in this multicultural city:

a sprinkle of kindness  — everyone around you is probably feeling just as lost/ tired or frustrated

unending patience  — in the tube, in class or while you wait to be served in Pret

and an open mind  — the familiar, the new, the strange — its all in London!

Your feedback (questions or contributions) on this subject would be greatly appreciated and welcome. Comment below or send an email to [email protected]

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6 Diversity College Essay Examples

What’s covered:, how to write the diversity essay after the end of affirmative action, essay #1: jewish identity, essay #2: being bangladeshi-american, essay #3: marvel vs dc, essay #4: leadership as a first-gen american, essay #5: protecting the earth, essay #6: music and accents, where to get your diversity essays edited, what is the diversity essay.

While working on your college applications, you may come across essays that focus on diversity , culture, or values. The purpose of these essays is to highlight any diverse views or opinions that you may bring to campus. Colleges want a diverse student body that’s made up of different backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and interests. These essay prompts are a way for them to see what students can bring to their school.

In this post, we will share six essays written by real students that cover the topic of culture and diversity. We’ll also include what each essay did well and where there is room for improvement. Hopefully, this will be a useful resource to inspire your own diversity essay.

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. That said, you should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and they will not have a favorable view of students who have plagiarized.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of race in college admissions was unconstitutional. In other words, they struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions . This will affect college-bound students of color in a number of ways, including lowering their chances of acceptance and reducing the amount of direct outreach they’ll receive from colleges. Another change to consider is the ways in which students should tackle their diversity essays.

Although colleges can no longer directly factor race into admissions, students aren’t prohibited from discussing their racial backgrounds in supplemental application essays. If your racial background is important to you, seriously consider writing about it in your diversity essays. If you don’t, admissions officers are extremely limited in their ability to consider your race when making an admission decision.

As in the essays listed below, discussing your race is an excellent tool for showing admissions officers the person behind the grades and test scores. Beyond that, it provides admissions officers with an opportunity to put themselves in your shoes—showing them how your background has presented challenges to overcome, helped build important life skills, and taught you valuable lessons.

Diversity Essay Examples

I was thirsty. In my wallet was a lone $10 bill, ultimately useless at my school’s vending machine. Tasked with scrounging together the $1 cost of a water bottle, I fished out and arranged the spare change that normally hid in the bottom of my backpack in neat piles of nickels and dimes on my desk. I swept them into a spare Ziploc and began to leave when a classmate snatched the bag and held it above my head.

“Want your money back, Jew?” she chanted, waving the coins around. I had forgotten the Star-of-David around my neck, but quickly realized she must have seen it and connected it to the stacks of coins. I am no stranger to experiencing and confronting antisemitism, but I had never been targeted in my school before. I grabbed my bag and sternly told her to leave. Although she sauntered away, the impact remained.

This incident serves as an example of the adversity I have and will continue to face from those who only see me as a stereotype. Ironically, however, these experiences of discrimination have only increased my pride as a member of the Jewish Community. Continuing to wear the Star-of-David connects me to my history and my family. I find meaning and direction in my community’s values, such as pride, education, and giving—and I am eager to transfer these values to my new community: the Duke community.

What the Essay Did Well

Writing about discrimination can be difficult, but if you are comfortable doing it, it can make for a powerful story. Although this essay is short and focused on one small interaction, it represents a much larger struggle for this student, and for that reason it makes the essay very impactful.

The author takes her time at the beginning of the essay to build the scene for the audience, which allows us to feel like we are there with her, making the hateful comments even more jarring later on. If she had just told us her classmate teased her with harmful stereotypes, we wouldn’t feel the same sense of anger as we do knowing that she was just trying to get a drink and ended up being harassed.

This essay does another important thing—it includes self-reflection on the experience and on the student’s identity. Without elaborating on the emotional impact of a situation, an essay about discrimination would make admission officers feel bad for the student, but they wouldn’t be compelled to admit the student. By describing how experiences like these drive her and make her more determined to embody positive values, this student reveals her character to the readers.

What Could Be Improved

While including emotional reflection in the latter half of the essay is important, the actual sentences could be tightened up a bit to leave a stronger impression. The student does a nice job of showing us her experience with antisemitism, but she just tells us about the impact it has on her. If she instead showed us what the impact looked like, the essay would be even better.

For example, rather than telling us “Continuing to wear the Star-of-David connects me to my history and my family,” she could have shown that connection: “My Star-of-David necklace thumps against my heart with every step I take, reminding me of my great-grandparents who had to hide their stars, my grandma’s spindly fingers lighting the menorah each Hanukkah, and my uncle’s homemade challah bread.” This new sentence reveals so much more than the existing sentence about the student and the deep connection she feels with her family and religion.

Life before was good: verdant forests, sumptuous curries, and a devoted family.

Then, my family abandoned our comfortable life in Bangladesh for a chance at the American dream in Los Angeles. Within our first year, my father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He lost his battle three weeks before my sixth birthday. Facing a new country without the steady presence of my father, we were vulnerable—prisoners of hardship in the land of the free.

We resettled in the Bronx, in my uncle’s renovated basement. It was meant to be our refuge, but I felt more displaced than ever. Gone were the high-rise condos of West L.A.; instead, government projects towered over the neighborhood. Pedestrians no longer smiled and greeted me; the atmosphere was hostile, even toxic. Schoolkids were quick to pick on those they saw as weak or foreign, hurling harsh words I’d never heard before.

Meanwhile, my family began integrating into the local Bangladeshi community. I struggled to understand those who shared my heritage. Bangladeshi mothers stayed home while fathers drove cabs and sold fruit by the roadside—painful societal positions. Riding on crosstown buses or walking home from school, I began to internalize these disparities.

During my fleeting encounters with affluent Upper East Siders, I saw kids my age with nannies, parents who wore suits to work, and luxurious apartments with spectacular views. Most took cabs to their destinations: cabs that Bangladeshis drove. I watched the mundane moments of their lives with longing, aching to plant myself in their shoes. Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day.

As I grappled with my relationship with the Bangladeshi community, I turned my attention to helping my Bronx community by pursuing an internship with Assemblyman Luis Sepulveda. I handled desk work and took calls, spending the bulk of my time actively listening to the hardships constituents faced—everything from a veteran stripped of his benefits to a grandmother unable to support her bedridden grandchild.

I’d never exposed myself to stories like these, and now I was the first to hear them. As an intern, I could only assist in what felt like the small ways—pointing out local job offerings, printing information on free ESL classes, reaching out to non-profits. But to a community facing an onslaught of intense struggles, I realized that something as small as these actions could have vast impacts.

Seeing the immediate consequences of my actions inspired me. Throughout that summer, I internalized my community’s daily challenges in a new light. I began to see the prevalent underemployment and cramped living quarters less as sources of shame. Instead, I saw them as realities that had to be acknowledged, but that could ultimately be remedied.

I also realized the benefits of the Bangladeshi culture I had been so ashamed of. My Bangla language skills were an asset to the office, and my understanding of Bangladeshi etiquette allowed for smooth communication between office staff and the office’s constituents. As I helped my neighbors navigate city services, I saw my heritage with pride—a perspective I never expected to have.

I can now appreciate the value of my unique culture and background, and the value of living with less. This perspective offers room for progress, community integration, and a future worth fighting for. My time with Assemblyman Sepulveda’s office taught me that I can be an agent of change who can enable this progression. Far from being ashamed of my community, I want to someday return to local politics in the Bronx to continue helping others access the American Dream. I hope to help my community appreciate the opportunity to make progress together. By embracing reality, I learned to live it. Along the way, I discovered one thing: life is good, but we can make it better.

This student’s passion for social justice and civic duty shines through in this essay because of how honest it is. Sharing their personal experience with immigrating, moving around, being an outsider, and finding a community allows us to see the hardships this student has faced and builds empathy towards their situation.

However, what really makes it strong is that the student goes beyond describing the difficulties they faced and explains the mental impact it had on them as a child: “Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day.” The rejection of their culture presented at the beginning of the essay creates a nice juxtaposition with the student’s view in the latter half of the essay, and helps demonstrate how they have matured.

They then use their experience interning as a way to delve into a change in their thought process about their culture. This experience also serves as a way to show how their passion for social justice began. Using this experience as a mechanism to explore their thoughts and feelings is an excellent example of how items that are included elsewhere on your application should be incorporated into your essay.

This essay prioritizes emotions and personal views over specific anecdotes. Although there are details and certain moments incorporated throughout to emphasize the author’s points, the main focus remains on the student and how they grapple with their culture and identity.

One area for improvement is the conclusion. Although the forward-looking approach is a nice way to end an essay focused on social justice, it would be nice to include more details and imagery in the conclusion. How does the student want to help their community? What government position do they see themselves holding one day?

A more impactful ending might describe the student walking into their office at the New York City Housing Authority in 15 years. This future student might be looking at the plans to build a new development in the Bronx just blocks away from where they grew up that would provide quality housing to people in their Bangladeshi community. They would smile while thinking about how far they have come from that young kid who used to be ashamed of their culture.

Superhero cinema is an oligopoly consisting of two prominent, towering brands: Marvel and DC. I’m a religious supporter of Marvel, but last year, I discovered that my friend, Tom, was a DC fan. After a vociferous 20-minute quarrel about which was better, we decided to allocate one day to have a professional debate, using carefully assembled and coherent arguments.

One week later, we both brought pages of notes and evidence cards (I also had my Iron-Man bobblehead for moral support). Our impartial moderator—a Disney fan—sat in the middle with a stopwatch, open-policy style. I began the debate by discussing how Marvel accentuated the humanity of the storyline—such as in Tony Stark’s transformation from an egotistical billionaire to a compassionate father—which drew in a broader audience, because more people resonated with certain aspects of the characters. Tom rebutted this by capitalizing on how Deadpool was a duplicate of Deathstroke, how Vision copied Red Tornado, and how DC sold more comics than Marvel.

40 minutes later, we reached an impasse. We were out of cards, and we both made excellent points, so our moderator was unable to declare a winner. Difficult conversations aren’t necessarily always the ones that make political headlines. Instead, a difficult discussion involves any topic with which people share an emotional connection.

Over the years, I became so emotionally invested in Marvel that my mind erected an impenetrable shield, blocking out all other possibilities. Even today, we haven’t decided which franchise was better, but I realized that I was undermining DC for no reason other than my own ignorance.

The inevitability of diversity suggests that it is our responsibility to understand the other person and what they believe in. We may not always experience a change in opinion, but we can grant ourselves the opportunity to expand our global perspective. I strive to continue this adventure to increase my awareness as a superhero aficionado, activist, and student, by engaging in conversations that require me to think beyond what I believe and to view the world from others’ perspectives.

And yes, Tom is still my friend.

Diversity doesn’t always have to be about culture or heritage; diversity exists all around us, even in our comic book preferences. The cleverness of this essay lies in the way the student flipped the traditional diversity prompt on its head and instead discussed his diverse perspective on a topic he is passionate about. If you don’t have a cultural connection you are compelled to write about, this is a nifty approach to a diversity prompt—if it’s handled appropriately.

While this student has a non-traditional topic, he still presents it in a way that pays respect to the key aspects of a diversity essay: depicting his perspective and recognizing the importance of diverse views. Just as someone who is writing about a culture that is possibly unfamiliar to the reader, the student describes what makes Marvel and DC unique and important to him and his friend, respectively. He also expands on how a lack of diversity in superhero consumption led to his feeling of ignorance, and how it now makes him appreciate the need for diversity in all aspects of his life.

This student is unapologetically himself in this essay, which is ultimately why this unorthodox topic is able to work. He committed to his passion for Marvel by sharing analytical takes on characters and demonstrating how the franchise was so important to his identity that it momentarily threatened a friendship. The inclusion of humor through his personal voice—e.g., referring to the argument as a professional debate and telling us that the friendship lived on—contributes to the essay feeling deeply personal.

Choosing an unconventional topic for a diversity essay requires extra care and attention to ensure that you are still addressing the core of the prompt. That being said, if you accomplish it successfully, it makes for an incredibly memorable essay that could easily set you apart!

While this is a great essay as is, the idea of diversity could have been addressed a little bit earlier in the piece to make it absolutely clear the student is writing about his diverse perspective. He positions Marvel and DC as two behemoths in the superhero movie industry, but in the event that his reader is unfamiliar with these two brands, there is little context about the cultural impact each has on its fans.

To this student, Marvel is more than just a movie franchise; it’s a crucial part of his identity, just as someone’s race or religion might be. In order for the reader to fully understand the weight of his perspective, there should be further elaboration—towards the beginning—on how important Marvel is to this student.

Leadership was thrust upon me at a young age. When I was six years old, my abusive father abandoned my family, leaving me to step up as the “man” of the house. From having to watch over my little sister to cooking dinner three nights a week, I never lived an ideal suburban life. I didn’t enjoy the luxuries of joining after-school activities, getting driven to school or friends’ houses, or taking weekend trips to the movies or bowling alley. Instead, I spent my childhood navigating legal hurdles, shouldering family responsibilities, and begrudgingly attending court-mandated therapy sessions.

At the same time, I tried to get decent grades and maintain my Colombian roots and Spanish fluency enough to at least partially communicate with my grandparents, both of whom speak little English. Although my childhood had its bright and joyful moments, much of it was weighty and would have been exhausting for any child to bear. In short, I grew up fast. However, the responsibilities I took on at home prepared me to be a leader and to work diligently, setting me up to use these skills later in life.

I didn’t have much time to explore my interests until high school, where I developed my knack for government and for serving others. Being cast in a lead role in my school’s fall production as a freshman was the first thing to give me the confidence I needed to pursue other activities: namely, student government. Shortly after being cast, I was elected Freshman Vice-President, a role that put me in charge of promoting events, delegating daily office tasks, collaborating with the administration on new school initiatives, and planning trips and fundraisers.

While my new position demanded a significant amount of responsibility, my childhood of helping my mom manage our household prepared me to be successful in the role. When I saw the happy faces of my classmates after a big event, I felt proud to know that I had made even a small difference to them. Seeing projects through to a successful outcome was thrilling. I enjoyed my time and responsibilities so much that I served all four years of high school, going on to become Executive Vice-President.

As I found success in high school, my mother and grandparents began speaking more about the life they faced prior to emigrating from Colombia. To better connect with them, I took a series of Spanish language classes to regain my fluency. After a practice run through my presentation on Bendíceme, Ultima ( Bless me, Ultima ) by Rudolofo Anaya, with my grandmother, she squeezed my hand and told me the story of how my family was forced from their home in order to live free of religious persecution. Though my grandparents have often expressed how much better their lives and their children’s lives have been in America, I have often struggled with my identity. I felt that much of it was erased with my loss of our native language.

In elementary school, I learned English best because in class I was surrounded by it. Spanish was more difficult to grasp without a formal education, and my family urged me to become fluent in English so I could be of better help to them in places as disparate as government agencies and grocery stores. When I was old enough to recognize the large part of my identity still rooted in being Colombian, it was challenging to connect these two sides of who I was.

Over time I have been able to reconcile the two in the context of my aspirations. I found purpose and fulfillment through student council, and I knew that I could help other families like my own if I worked in local government. By working through city offices that address housing, education, and support for survivors of childhood abuse, I could give others the same liberties and opportunities my family has enjoyed in this country. Doing so would also help me honor my roots as a first-generation American.

I have been a leader my entire life. Both at Harvard and after graduation, I want to continue that trend. I hope to volunteer with organizations that share my goals. I want to advise policy-making politicians on ways to make children and new immigrants safer and more secure. When my family was at their worst, my community gave back. I hope to give that gift to future generations. A career in local, city-based public service is not a rashly made decision; it is a reflection of where I’ve already been in life, and where I want to be in the future.

Although this essay begins on a somber note, it goes on to show this student’s determination and the joy he found. Importantly, it also ends with a positive, forward-looking perspective. This is a great example of how including your hardship can bolster an essay as long as it is not the essay’s main focus.

Explaining the challenges this student faced from a young age—becoming the man of the house, dealing with legal matters, maintaining good grades, etc.—builds sympathy for his situation. However, the first paragraph is even more impactful because he explains the emotional toll these actions had on him. We understand how he lost the innocence of his childhood and how he struggled to remain connected to his Colombian heritage with all his other responsibilities. Including these details truly allows the reader to see this student’s struggle, making us all the more joyful when he comes out stronger in the end.

Pivoting to discuss positive experiences with student government and Spanish classes for the rest of the essay demonstrates that this student has a positive approach to life and is willing to push through challenges. The tone of the essay shifts from heavy to uplifting. He explains the joy he got out of helping his classmates and connecting with his grandparents, once again providing emotional reflection to make the reader care more.

Overall, this essay does a nice job of demonstrating how this student approaches challenges and negative experiences. Admitting that the responsibilities of his childhood had a silver lining shows his maturity and how he will be able to succeed in government one day. The essay strikes a healthy balance between challenge and hope, leaving us with a positive view of a student with such emotional maturity.

Although the content of this essay is very strong, it struggles with redundancy and disorganized information. He mentions his passion for government at the beginning of the student government paragraph, then again addresses government in the paragraph focused on his Colombian heritage, and concludes by talking about how he wants to get into government once more. Similarly, in the first paragraph, he discusses the struggle of maintaining his Colombian identity and then fully delves into that topic in the third paragraph.

The repetition of ideas and lack of a streamlined organization of this student’s thoughts diminishes some of the emotional impact of the story. The reader is left trying to piece together a swirling mass of information on their own, rather than having a focused, sequential order to follow.

This could be fixed if the student rearranged details to make each paragraph focused on a singular idea. For example, the first paragraph could be about his childhood. The second could be about how student government sparked his interest in government and what he hopes to do one day. The third could be about how he reconnected with his Colombian roots through his Spanish classes, after years of struggling with his identity. And the final paragraph could tie everything together by explaining how everything led to him wanting to pursue a future serving others, particularly immigrants like his family.

Alternatively, the essay could follow a sequential order that would start with his childhood, then explain his struggle with his identity, then show how student government and Spanish classes helped him find himself, and finally, conclude with what he hopes to accomplish by pursuing government.

I never understood the power of community until I left home to join seven strangers in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Although we flew in from distant corners of the U.S., we shared a common purpose: immersing ourselves in our passion for protecting the natural world.

Back home in my predominantly conservative suburb, my neighbors had brushed off environmental concerns. My classmates debated the feasibility of Trump’s wall, not the deteriorating state of our planet. Contrastingly, these seven strangers delighted in bird-watching, brightened at the mention of medicinal tree sap, and understood why I once ran across a four-lane highway to retrieve discarded beer cans.

Their histories barely resembled mine, yet our values aligned intimately. We did not hesitate to joke about bullet ants, gush about the versatility of tree bark, or discuss the destructive consequences of materialism. Together, we let our inner tree-huggers run free.

In the short life of our little community, we did what we thought was impossible. By feeding on each other’s infectious tenacity, we cultivated an atmosphere that deepened our commitment to our values and empowered us to speak out on behalf of the environment. After a week of stimulating conversations and introspective revelations about engaging people from our hometowns in environmental advocacy, we developed a shared determination to devote our lives to this cause.

As we shared a goodbye hug, my new friend whispered, “The world needs saving. Someone’s gotta do it.” For the first time, I believed that that someone could be me.

This student is expressing their diversity through their involvement in a particular community—another nice approach if you don’t want to write about culture or ethnicity. We all have unique things that we geek out over. This student expresses the joy that they derived from finding a community where they could express their love for the environment. Passion is fundamental to university life and generally finds its way into any successful application.

The essay finds strength in the fact that readers feel for the student. We get a little bit of backstory about where they come from and how they felt silenced— “Back home in my predominantly conservative suburb, my neighbors had brushed off environmental concerns” —so it’s easy to feel joy for them when they get set free and finally find their community.

This student displays clear values: community, ecoconsciousness, dedication, and compassion. An admissions officer who reads a diversity essay is looking for students with strong values who will enrich the university community with their unique perspective—that sounds just like this student!

One area of weakness in this essay is the introduction. The opening line— “I never understood the power of community until I left home to join seven strangers in the Ecuadorian rainforest” —is a bit clichéd. Introductions should be captivating and build excitement and suspense for what is to come. Simply telling the reader about how your experience made you understand the power of community reveals the main takeaway of your essay without the reader needing to go any further.

Instead of starting this essay with a summary of what the essay is about, the student should have made their hook part of the story. Whether that looks like them being exasperated with comments their classmates made about politics, or them looking around apprehensively at the seven strangers in their program as they all boarded their flight, the student should start off in the action.

India holds a permanent place in my heart and ears. Whenever I returned on a trip or vacation, I would show my grandmother how to play Monopoly and she would let me tie her sari. I would teach my grandfather English idioms—which he would repeat to random people and fishmongers on the streets—and he would teach me Telugu phrases.

It was a curious exchange of worlds that I am reminded of every time I listen to Indian music. It was these tunes that helped me reconnect with my heritage and ground my meandering identity. Indian music, unlike the stereotype I’d long been imbued with, was not just a one-and-done Bollywood dance number! Each region and language was like an island with its own unique sonic identity. I’m grateful for my discovery of Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, and Tamil tunes, for these discoveries have opened me up to the incredible smorgasbord of diversity, depth, and complexity within the subcontinent I was born in.

Here’s an entirely-different sonic identity for you: Texan slang. “Couldya pass the Mango seltzer, please, hon?” asked my Houstonian neighbor, Rae Ann—her syllables melding together like the sticky cake batter we were making.

Rae Ann and her twang were real curiosities to me. Once, she invited my family to a traditional Texan barbecue with the rest of our neighbors. As Hindus, we didn’t eat beef, so we showed up with chicken kebabs, instead. Rather than looking at us bizarrely, she gladly accepted the dish, lining it up beside grilled loins and hamburger patties.

Her gesture was a small but very well-accepted one and I quickly became convinced she was the human manifestation of “Southern hospitality”—something reflected in each of her viscous, honey-dripping phrases. “Watch out for the skeeters!” was an excellent example. It was always funny at first, but conveyed a simple message: We’ve got each other’s backs and together, we can overcome the blood-sucking mosquitoes of the Houstonian summer! I began to see how her words built bridges, not boundaries.

I believe that sounds—whether it’s music or accents—can make a difference in the ways we perceive and accept individuals from other backgrounds. But sound is about listening too. In Rice’s residential college, I would be the type of person to strike up a conversation with an international student and ask for one of their Airpods (you’d be surprised how many different genres and languages of music I’ve picked up in this way!).

As both an international student and Houstonian at heart, I hope to bridge the gap between Rice’s domestic and international populations. Whether it’s organizing cultural events or simply taking the time to get to know a student whose first language isn’t English, I look forward to listening to the stories that only a fellow wanderer can tell.

This essay does an excellent job of addressing two aspects of this student’s identity. Looking at diversity through sound is a very creative way to descriptively depict their Indian and Texan cultures. Essays are always more successful when they stimulate the senses, so framing the entire response around sound automatically opens the door for vivid imagery.

The quotes from this student’s quirky neighbor bring a sense of realism to the essay. We can feel ourselves at the barbecue and hear her thick Texan accent coming through. The way people communicate is a huge part of their culture and identity, so the way that this student perfectly captures the essence of their Texan identity with accented phrases is skillfully done.

This essay does such a great job of making the sounds of Texas jump off the page, so it is a bit disappointing that it wasn’t able to accomplish the same for India. The student describes the different Indian languages and music styles, but doesn’t bring them to life with quotes or onomatopoeia in the manner that they did for the sounds of Texas.

They could have described the buzz of the sitar or the lyrical pattern of the Telugu phrases their grandfather taught them. Telling us about the diversity of sounds in Indian music is fine, but if the reader can’t appreciate what those sounds resemble, it makes it harder to understand the Indian half of the author’s identity. Especially since this student emulated the sounds and essence of Texas so well, it’s important that India is given the same treatment so we can fully appreciate both sides of this essay.

More Supplemental Essay Tips

How to Write a Stellar “Why This College?” Essay + Examples

How to Write a Stellar Extracurricular Activity College Essay

Do you want feedback on your diversity essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

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15.8 Compare-and-Contrast Essay

Learning objective.

• Read an example of the compare-and-contrast rhetorical mode.

Comparing and Contrasting London and Washington, DC

Both Washington, DC, and London are capital cities of English-speaking countries, and yet they offer vastly different experiences to their residents and visitors. Comparing and contrasting the two cities based on their history, their culture, and their residents show how different and similar the two are.

Both cities are rich in world and national history, though they developed on very different time lines. London, for example, has a history that dates back over two thousand years. It was part of the Roman Empire and known by the similar name, Londinium. It was not only one of the northernmost points of the Roman Empire but also the epicenter of the British Empire where it held significant global influence from the early sixteenth century on through the early twentieth century. Washington, DC, on the other hand, has only formally existed since the late eighteenth century. Though Native Americans inhabited the land several thousand years earlier, and settlers inhabited the land as early as the sixteenth century, the city did not become the capital of the United States until the 1790s. From that point onward to today, however, Washington, DC, has increasingly maintained significant global influence. Even though both cities have different histories, they have both held, and continue to hold, significant social influence in the economic and cultural global spheres.

Both Washington, DC, and London offer a wide array of museums that harbor many of the world’s most prized treasures. While Washington, DC, has the National Gallery of Art and several other Smithsonian galleries, London’s art scene and galleries have a definite edge in this category. From the Tate Modern to the British National Gallery, London’s art ranks among the world’s best. This difference and advantage has much to do with London and Britain’s historical depth compared to that of the United States. London has a much richer past than Washington, DC, and consequently has a lot more material to pull from when arranging its collections. Both cities have thriving theater districts, but again, London wins this comparison, too, both in quantity and quality of theater choices. With regard to other cultural places like restaurants, pubs, and bars, both cities are very comparable. Both have a wide selection of expensive, elegant restaurants as well as a similar amount of global and national chains. While London may be better known for its pubs and taste in beer, DC offers a different bar-going experience. With clubs and pubs that tend to stay open later than their British counterparts, the DC night life tend to be less reserved overall.

Both cities also share and differ in cultural diversity and cost of living. Both cities share a very expensive cost of living—both in terms of housing and shopping. A downtown one-bedroom apartment in DC can easily cost $1,800 per month, and a similar “flat” in London may double that amount. These high costs create socioeconomic disparity among the residents. Although both cities’ residents are predominantly wealthy, both have a significantly large population of poor and homeless. Perhaps the most significant difference between the resident demographics is the racial makeup. Washington, DC, is a “minority majority” city, which means the majority of its citizens are races other than white. In 2009, according to the US Census, 55 percent of DC residents were classified as “Black or African American” and 35 percent of its residents were classified as “white.” London, by contrast, has very few minorities—in 2006, 70 percent of its population was “white,” while only 10 percent was “black.” The racial demographic differences between the cities is drastic.

Even though Washington, DC, and London are major capital cities of English-speaking countries in the Western world, they have many differences along with their similarities. They have vastly different histories, art cultures, and racial demographics, but they remain similar in their cost of living and socioeconomic disparity.

Online Compare-and-Contrast Essay Alternatives

Ellen Laird compares and contrasts traditional and distance education in I’m Your Teacher, Not Your Internet-Service Provider :

• http://celt.cui.edu/celt/webct_for_instructors/Laird_Article.htm

Deborah Tannen compares and contrasts conversation styles in Sex, Lies and Conversation: Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women to Talk to Each Other?

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5523ffe4e4b012b2c4ebd8fc/t/5627dc4de4b00c9587e32fa0/1445452877014/Sex%2C+Lies+and+Conversation.PDF

Alex Wright examines communication patterns, old and new, in Friending, Ancient or Otherwise :

• http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/weekinreview/02wright.html

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Are you seeking one-on-one college counseling and/or essay support? Limited spots are now available. Click here to learn more.

How to Write the Diversity Essay – With Examples

May 1, 2024

The diversity essay has newfound significance in college application packages following the 2023 SCOTUS ruling against race-conscious admissions. Affirmative action began as an attempt to redress unequal access to economic and social mobility associated with higher education. But before the 2023 ruling, colleges frequently defended the policy based on their “compelling interest” in fostering diverse campuses. The reasoning goes that there are certain educational benefits that come from heterogeneous learning environments. Now, the diversity essay has become key for admissions officials in achieving their compelling interest in campus diversity. Thus, unlocking how to write a diversity essay enhances an applicant’s ability to describe their fit with a campus environment. This article describes the genre and provides diversity essay examples to help any applicant express how they conceptualize and contribute to diversity.

How to Write a Diversity Essay – Defining the Genre

Diversity essays in many ways resemble the personal statement genre. Like personal statements, they help readers get to know applicants beyond their academic and extracurricular achievements. What makes an applicant unique? Precisely what motivates or inspires them? What is their demeanor like and how do they interact with others? All these questions are useful ways of thinking about the purpose and value of the diversity essay.

It’s important to realize that the essay does not need to focus on aspects like race, religion, or sexuality. Some applicants may choose to write about their relationship to these or other protected identity categories. But applicants shouldn’t feel obligated to ‘come out’ in a diversity essay. Conversely, they should not be anxious if they feel their background doesn’t qualify them as ‘diverse.’

Instead, the diversity essay helps demonstrate broader thinking about what makes applicants unique that admissions officials can’t glean elsewhere. Usually, it also directly or indirectly indicates how an applicant will enhance the campus community they hope to join. Diversity essays can explicitly connect past experiences with future plans. Or they can offer a more general sense of how one’s background will influence their actions in college.

Thus, the diversity essay conveys both aspects that make an applicant unique and arguments for how those aspects will contribute on campus. The somewhat daunting genre is, in fact, a great opportunity for applicants to articulate how their background, identity, or formative experiences will shape their academic, intellectual, social, and professional trajectories.

Diversity College Essay Examples of Prompts – Sharing a Story

All diversity essays ask applicants to share what makes them unique and convey how that equips them for university life. However, colleges will typically ask applicants to approach this broad topic from a variety of different angles. Since it’s likely applicants will encounter some version of the genre in either required or supplemental essay assignments, it’s a good idea to have a template diversity essay ready to adapt to each specific prompt.

One of the most standard prompts is the “share a story” prompt. For example, here’s the diversity-related Common App prompt:

“Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.”

This prompt is deliberately broad, inviting applicants to articulate their distinctive qualities in myriad ways. What is unsaid, but likely expected, is some statement about how the story evidences the ability to enhance campus diversity.

Diversity College Essay Examples of Prompts – Describing Contribution

Another common prompt explicitly asks students to reflect on diversity while centering what they will contribute in college. A good example of this prompt comes from the University of Miami’s supplemental essay:

Located within one of the most dynamic cities in the world, the University of Miami is a distinctive community with a variety of cultures, traditions, histories, languages, and backgrounds. The University of Miami is a values-based and purpose-driven postsecondary institution that embraces diversity and inclusivity in all its forms and strives to create a culture of belonging, where every person feels valued and has an opportunity to contribute.

Please describe how your unique experiences, challenges overcome, or skills acquired would contribute to our distinctive University community. (250 words)

In essays responding to these kinds of prompts, its smart to more deliberately tailor your essay to what you know about the institution and its values around diversity. You’ll need a substantial part of the essay to address not only your “story” but your anticipated institutional contribution.

Diversity College Essay Examples of Prompts – Navigating Difference

The last type of diversity essay prompt worth mentioning asks applicants to explain how they experience and navigate difference. It could be a prompt about dealing with “diverse perspectives.” Or it could ask the applicant to tell a story involving someone different than them. Regardless of the framing, these types of prompts ask you to unfold a theory of diversity stemming from social encounters. Applicants might still think of how they can use the essay to frame what makes them unique. However, here colleges are also hoping for insight into how applicants will deal with the immense diversity of college life beyond their unique experiences. In these cases, it’s especially important to use a story kernel to draw attention to fundamental beliefs and values around diversity.

  How to Write a Diversity Essay – Tips for Writing

Before we get to the diversity college essay examples, some general tips for writing the diversity essay:

• Be authentic: This is not the place to embellish, exaggerate, or overstate your experiences. Writing with humility and awareness of your own limitations can only help you with the diversity essay. So don’t write about who you think the admissions committee wants to see – write about yourself.
• Find dynamic intersections: One effective brainstorming strategy is to think of two or more aspects of your background, identity, and interests you might combine. For example, in one of the examples below, the writer talks about their speech impediment alongside their passion for poetry. By thinking of aspects of your experience to combine, you’ll likely generate more original material than focusing on just one.
• Include a thesis: Diversity essays follow more general conventions of personal statement writing. That means you should tell a story about yourself, but also make it double as an argumentative piece of writing. Including a thesis in the first paragraph can clearly signal the argumentative hook of the essay for your reader.
• Include your definition of diversity: Early in the essay you should define what diversity means to you. It’s important that this definition is as original as possible, preferably connecting to the story you are narrating. To avoid cliché, you might write out a bunch of definitions of diversity. Then, review them and get rid of any that seem like something you’d see in a dictionary or an inspirational poster. Get those clichéd definitions out of your system early, so you can wow your audience with your own carefully considered definition.

How to Write a Diversity Essay – Tips for Writing (Cont.)

• Zoom out to diversity more broadly: This tip is especially important you are not writing about protected minority identities like race, religion, and sexuality. Again, it’s fine to not focus on these aspects of diversity. But you’ll want to have some space in the essay where you connect your very specific understanding of diversity to a larger system of values that can include those identities.

Revision is another, evergreen tip for writing good diversity essays. You should also remember that you are writing in a personal and narrative-based genre. So, try to be as creative as possible! If you find enjoyment in writing it, chances are better your audience will find entertainment value in reading it.

How to Write a Diversity Essay – Diversity Essay Examples

The first example addresses the “share a story” prompt. It is written in the voice of Karim Amir, the main character of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia .

As a child of the suburbs, I have frequently navigated the labyrinthine alleys of identity. Born to an English mother and an Indian father, I inherited a rich blend of traditions, customs, and perspectives. From an early age, I found myself straddling two worlds, trying to reconcile the conflicting expectations of my dual heritage. Yet, it was only through the lens of acting that I began to understand the true fluidity of identity.

• A fairly typical table setting first paragraph, foregrounding themes of identity and performance
• Includes a “thesis” in the final sentence suggesting the essay’s narrative and argumentative arc

Diversity, to me, is more than just a buzzword describing a melting pot of ethnic backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations. Instead, it evokes the unfathomable heterogeneity of human experience that I aim to help capture through performance. On the stage, I have often been slotted into Asian and other ethnic minority roles. I’ve had to deal with discriminatory directors who complain I am not Indian enough. Sometimes, it has even been tempting to play into established stereotypes attached to the parts I am playing. However, acting has ultimately helped me to see that the social types we imagine when we think of the word ‘diversity’ are ultimately fantastical constructions. Prescribed identities may help us to feel a sense of belonging, but they also distort what makes us radically unique.

• Includes an original definition of diversity, which the writer compellingly contrasts with clichéd definitions
• Good narrative dynamism, stressing how the writer has experienced growth over time

Diversity Essay Examples Continued – Example One

The main challenge for an actor is to dig beneath the “type” of character to find the real human being underneath. Rising to this challenge entails discarding with lazy stereotypes and scaling what can seem to be insurmountable differences. Bringing human drama to life, making it believable, requires us to realize a more fundamental meaning of diversity. It means locating each character at their own unique intersection of identity. My story, like all the stories I aspire to tell as an actor, can inspire others to search for and celebrate their specificity. 

• Focuses in on the kernel of wisdom acquired over the course of the narrative
• Indirectly suggests what the applicant can contribute to the admitted class

Acting has ultimately underlined an important takeaway of my dual heritage: all identities are, in a sense, performed. This doesn’t mean that heritage is not important, or that identities are not significant rallying points for community. Instead, it means recognizing that identity isn’t a prison, but a stage.

• Draws the reader back to where the essay began, locating them at the intersection of two aspects of writer’s background
• Sharply and deftly weaves a course between saying identities are fictions and saying that identities matter (rather than potentially alienating reader by picking one over the other)

Diversity Essay Examples Continued – Example Two

The second example addresses a prompt about what the applicant can contribute to a diverse campus. It is written from the perspective of Jason Taylor, David Mitchell’s protagonist in Black Swan Green .

Growing up with a stutter, each word was a hesitant step, every sentence a delicate balance between perseverance and frustration. I came to think of the written word as a sanctuary away from the staccato rhythm of my speech. In crafting melodically flowing poems, I discovered a language unfettered by the constraints of my impediment. However, diving deeper into poetry eventually made me realize how my stammer had a humanistic rhythm all its own.

• Situates us at the intersection of two themes – a speech impediment and poetry – and uses the thesis to gesture to their synthesis
• Nicely matches form and content. The writer uses this opportunity to demonstrate their facility with literary language.

Immersing myself in the genius of Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, and Maya Angelou, I learned to embrace the beauty of diversity in language, rhythm, and life itself. Angelou wrote that “Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.” For me, this quote illuminates how diversity is not simply a static expression of discrete differences. Instead, diversity teaches us the beauty of a multitude of rhythms we can learn from and incorporate in a mutual dance. If “everything in the universe has a rhythm,” then it’s also possible that anything can be poetry. Even my stuttering speech can dance.

• Provides a unique definition of diversity
• Conveys growth over time
• Connects kernel of wisdom back to the essay’s narrative starting point

As I embark on this new chapter of my life, I bring with me the lessons learned from the interplay of rhythm and verse. I bring a perspective rooted in empathy, an unwavering commitment to inclusivity, and a belief in language as the ultimate tool of transformative social connection. I am prepared to enter your university community, adding a unique voice that refuses to be silent. 

• Directly addresses how background and experiences will contribute to campus life
• Conveys contributions in an analytic mode (second sentence) and more literary and personal mode (third sentence)

Additional Resources 

Diversity essays can seem intimidating because of the political baggage we bring to the word ‘diversity.’ But applicants should feel liberated by the opportunity to describe what makes them unique. It doesn’t matter if applicants choose to write about aspects of identity, life experiences, or personal challenges. What matters is telling a compelling story of personal growth. Also significant is relating that story to an original theory of the function and value of diversity in society. At the end of the day, committees want to know their applicants deeper and get a holistic sense of how they will improve the educational lives of those around them.

Additional Reading and Resources

• 10 Instructive Common App Essay Examples 
• How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay + Example
• Common App Essay Prompts
• Why This College Essay – Tips for Success
• How to Write a Body Paragraph for a College Essay
• UC Essay Examples 
• College Essay

Tyler Talbott

Tyler holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Missouri and two Master of Arts degrees in English, one from the University of Maryland and another from Northwestern University. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English at Northwestern University, where he also works as a graduate writing fellow.

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• How to Write a Diversity Essay | Tips & Examples

How to Write a Diversity Essay | Tips & Examples

Published on November 1, 2021 by Kirsten Courault . Revised on May 31, 2023.

Table of contents

What is a diversity essay, identify how you will enrich the campus community, share stories about your lived experience, explain how your background or identity has affected your life, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

Diversity essays ask students to highlight an important aspect of their identity, background, culture, experience, viewpoints, beliefs, skills, passions, goals, etc.

Diversity essays can come in many forms. Some scholarships are offered specifically for students who come from an underrepresented background or identity in higher education. At highly competitive schools, supplemental diversity essays require students to address how they will enhance the student body with a unique perspective, identity, or background.

In the Common Application and applications for several other colleges, some main essay prompts ask about how your background, identity, or experience has affected you.

Why schools want a diversity essay

Many universities believe a student body representing different perspectives, beliefs, identities, and backgrounds will enhance the campus learning and community experience.

Admissions officers are interested in hearing about how your unique background, identity, beliefs, culture, or characteristics will enrich the campus community.

Through the diversity essay, admissions officers want students to articulate the following:

• What makes them different from other applicants
• Stories related to their background, identity, or experience
• How their unique lived experience has affected their outlook, activities, and goals

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Think about what aspects of your identity or background make you unique, and choose one that has significantly impacted your life.

For some students, it may be easy to identify what sets them apart from their peers. But if you’re having trouble identifying what makes you different from other applicants, consider your life from an outsider’s perspective. Don’t presume your lived experiences are normal or boring just because you’re used to them.

Some examples of identities or experiences that you might write about include the following:

• Race/ethnicity
• Gender identity
• Sexual orientation
• Nationality
• Socioeconomic status
• Immigration background
• Religion/belief system
• Place of residence
• Family circumstances
• Extracurricular activities related to diversity

Include vulnerable, authentic stories about your lived experiences. Maintain focus on your experience rather than going into too much detail comparing yourself to others or describing their experiences.

Keep the focus on you

Tell a story about how your background, identity, or experience has impacted you. While you can briefly mention another person’s experience to provide context, be sure to keep the essay focused on you. Admissions officers are mostly interested in learning about your lived experience, not anyone else’s.

When I was a baby, my grandmother took me in, even though that meant postponing her retirement and continuing to work full-time at the local hairdresser. Even working every shift she could, she never missed a single school play or soccer game.

She and I had a really special bond, even creating our own special language to leave each other secret notes and messages. She always pushed me to succeed in school, and celebrated every academic achievement like it was worthy of a Nobel Prize. Every month, any leftover tip money she received at work went to a special 509 savings plan for my college education.

When I was in the 10th grade, my grandmother was diagnosed with ALS. We didn’t have health insurance, and what began with quitting soccer eventually led to dropping out of school as her condition worsened. In between her doctor’s appointments, keeping the house tidy, and keeping her comfortable, I took advantage of those few free moments to study for the GED.

In school pictures at Raleigh Elementary School, you could immediately spot me as “that Asian girl.” At lunch, I used to bring leftover fun see noodles, but after my classmates remarked how they smelled disgusting, I begged my mom to make a “regular” lunch of sliced bread, mayonnaise, and deli meat.

Although born and raised in North Carolina, I felt a cultural obligation to learn my “mother tongue” and reconnect with my “homeland.” After two years of all-day Saturday Chinese school, I finally visited Beijing for the first time, expecting I would finally belong. While my face initially assured locals of my Chinese identity, the moment I spoke, my cover was blown. My Chinese was littered with tonal errors, and I was instantly labeled as an “ABC,” American-born Chinese.

I felt culturally homeless.

Speak from your own experience

Highlight your actions, difficulties, and feelings rather than comparing yourself to others. While it may be tempting to write about how you have been more or less fortunate than those around you, keep the focus on you and your unique experiences, as shown below.

I began to despair when the FAFSA website once again filled with red error messages.

I had been at the local library for hours and hadn’t even been able to finish the form, much less the other to-do items for my application.

I am the first person in my family to even consider going to college. My parents work two jobs each, but even then, it’s sometimes very hard to make ends meet. Rather than playing soccer or competing in speech and debate, I help my family by taking care of my younger siblings after school and on the weekends.

“We only speak one language here. Speak proper English!” roared a store owner when I had attempted to buy bread and accidentally used the wrong preposition.

In middle school, I had relentlessly studied English grammar textbooks and received the highest marks.

Leaving Seoul was hard, but living in West Orange, New Jersey was much harder一especially navigating everyday communication with Americans.

After sharing relevant personal stories, make sure to provide insight into how your lived experience has influenced your perspective, activities, and goals. You should also explain how your background led you to apply to this university and why you’re a good fit.

Include your outlook, actions, and goals

Conclude your essay with an insight about how your background or identity has affected your outlook, actions, and goals. You should include specific actions and activities that you have done as a result of your insight.

One night, before the midnight premiere of Avengers: Endgame , I stopped by my best friend Maria’s house. Her mother prepared tamales, churros, and Mexican hot chocolate, packing them all neatly in an Igloo lunch box. As we sat in the line snaking around the AMC theater, I thought back to when Maria and I took salsa classes together and when we belted out Selena’s “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” at karaoke. In that moment, as I munched on a chicken tamale, I realized how much I admired the beauty, complexity, and joy in Maria’s culture but had suppressed and devalued my own.

The following semester, I joined Model UN. Since then, I have learned how to proudly represent other countries and have gained cultural perspectives other than my own. I now understand that all cultures, including my own, are equal. I still struggle with small triggers, like when I go through airport security and feel a suspicious glance toward me, or when I feel self-conscious for bringing kabsa to school lunch. But in the future, I hope to study and work in international relations to continue learning about other cultures and impart a positive impression of Saudi culture to the world.

The smell of the early morning dew and the welcoming whinnies of my family’s horses are some of my most treasured childhood memories. To this day, our farm remains so rural that we do not have broadband access, and we’re too far away from the closest town for the postal service to reach us.

Going to school regularly was always a struggle: between the unceasing demands of the farm and our lack of connectivity, it was hard to keep up with my studies. Despite being a voracious reader, avid amateur chemist, and active participant in the classroom, emergencies and unforeseen events at the farm meant that I had a lot of unexcused absences.

Although it had challenges, my upbringing taught me resilience, the value of hard work, and the importance of family. Staying up all night to watch a foal being born, successfully saving the animals from a minor fire, and finding ways to soothe a nervous mare afraid of thunder have led to an unbreakable family bond.

Our farm is my family’s birthright and our livelihood, and I am eager to learn how to ensure the farm’s financial and technological success for future generations. In college, I am looking forward to joining a chapter of Future Farmers of America and studying agricultural business to carry my family’s legacy forward.

Tailor your answer to the university

After explaining how your identity or background will enrich the university’s existing student body, you can mention the university organizations, groups, or courses in which you’re interested.

Maybe a larger public school setting will allow you to broaden your community, or a small liberal arts college has a specialized program that will give you space to discover your voice and identity. Perhaps this particular university has an active affinity group you’d like to join.

Demonstrating how a university’s specific programs or clubs are relevant to you can show that you’ve done your research and would be a great addition to the university.

At the University of Michigan Engineering, I want to study engineering not only to emulate my mother’s achievements and strength, but also to forge my own path as an engineer with disabilities. I appreciate the University of Michigan’s long-standing dedication to supporting students with disabilities in ways ranging from accessible housing to assistive technology. At the University of Michigan Engineering, I want to receive a top-notch education and use it to inspire others to strive for their best, regardless of their circumstances.

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

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In addition to your main college essay , some schools and scholarships may ask for a supplementary essay focused on an aspect of your identity or background. This is sometimes called a diversity essay .

Many universities believe a student body composed of different perspectives, beliefs, identities, and backgrounds will enhance the campus learning and community experience.

Admissions officers are interested in hearing about how your unique background, identity, beliefs, culture, or characteristics will enrich the campus community, which is why they assign a diversity essay .

To write an effective diversity essay , include vulnerable, authentic stories about your unique identity, background, or perspective. Provide insight into how your lived experience has influenced your outlook, activities, and goals. If relevant, you should also mention how your background has led you to apply for this university and why you’re a good fit.

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Understanding Multicultural Societies

A multicultural society refers to a diverse community where various ethnic groups of people coexist within one society. Examples of such cities include London, Toronto, and New York. By taking the time to understand different cultures, we can all coexist in a more positive world.

Here, we’ll explore common questions about multiculturalism.

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What are some examples of multicultural societies?

An example of a multicultural society is Canada where a large range of different ethnicities including Chinese, Indian, and Indigenous People live, just to name a few. It is a global place where different groups coexist together.

Why is society multicultural?

A society is multicultural because of the many different cultural groups in the world. This means that it has succeeded past exclusion, discrimination, and most importantly oppression to become a more inclusive society. Modern democracies especially have members with different viewpoints.

Which country is an example of a multicultural society?

The United States is a melting pot of people from different races, ethnicities, and countries. This represents coming together as one – Americans – and acknowledging the differences between us is what makes us so special and unique.

What are three examples of multicultural societies?

Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. are also notable multicultural societies.

What is the biggest multicultural country?

The most diverse countries are found in Africa, especially Liberia, Nepal, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Mali. The majority of these countries have racial diversity higher than 80%.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of living in a multicultural society?

Living in a multicultural society comes with both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, it offers exposure to diverse cultures, fostering tolerance and enriching one’s perspective. It promotes a vibrant cultural tapestry, leading to culinary, artistic, and social richness. Multicultural societies often have access to a wider range of international experiences. However, challenges can include communication barriers, misunderstandings, and occasional tensions between different cultural groups. Cultural clashes can occur, and it may be challenging to maintain a shared national identity.

To learn more about how living in a multicultural society affects the workplace, check out this article on global communications styles in the workplace .

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Article Contents

1. introduction, 2. literature on diversity, 3. cultural diversity, wages and rents, 4. theoretical framework, 5. wage and rent regressions, 6. discussion and conclusions, a. data appendix.

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The economic value of cultural diversity: evidence from US cities

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Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri, The economic value of cultural diversity: evidence from US cities, Journal of Economic Geography , Volume 6, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 9–44, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbi002

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What are the economic consequences to U.S. natives of the growing diversity of American cities? Is their productivity or utility affected by cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of U.S. residents? We document in this paper a very robust correlation: US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born increased between 1970 and 1990, experienced a significant increase in their wage and in the rental price of their housing. Such finding is economically significant and survives omitted variable bias and endogeneity bias. As people and firms are mobile across cities in the long run we argue that, in equilibrium, these correlations are consistent with a net positive effect of cultural diversity on the productivity of natives.

See Peri (2005) for a comparison of immigration in the US and in the EU during the nineties.

There is a large and growing body of empirical literature on the consequences of migration (see, among others Borjas 1994 , 1995 , 1999 , 2003 ; Borjas et al., 1997 ; Boeri et al., 2002 ; Card 1990 , 2001 ; Card and Di Nardo, 2000 ). This literature, however, has disproportionately focussed on one aspect of the subject: the impact of low-skilled immigrants on US wages. These studies typically treat labor markets for different skills as segmented, and focus on the consequences of wages for different skill-groups in the short and medium run. Our work takes a different angle. Rather than study the short-run effects of new immigrants on the receiving country in a classic model of skill supply and demand, we consider a simple multi-city model of production and consumption in order to ask ‘what is the economic value of “diversity” that the foreign born bring to each city’. The foreign born conceivably have different sets of skills and abilities than the US born, and therefore could serve as valuable factors in the production of differentiated goods and services. As different US cities attract very different shares of foreign-born we can learn about the value of such ‘diversity’ from the long-run equilibrium distribution of wages and prices across cities. For the rest of the paper, the term ‘cultural diversity’ will refer to the diversity of the workers' countries of birth (rather than ethnicity or ancestry characteristics) and will be measured by an index of ‘plurality’ of countries of origin.

Diversity over several dimensions has been considered by economists as valuable both in consumption and production. Jacobs (1969) attributes the prosperity of cities to their industrial diversity. Quigley (1998) and Glaeser et al. (2001) identify the diversity of available consumption goods and services as one of the attractive features of cities. Florida (2002a , 2002b) stresses the importance of the diversity of creative professions employed in research and development or high tech industries. More generally, Fujita et al. (1999) use the ‘love of variety’ in preferences and technology as the building block of their theory of spatial development: the production of a larger variety of goods and services in a particular location increases the productivity and utility of people living in that location.

An economically oriented survey of the pros and cons of ethnic diversity is presented by Alesina and La Ferrara (2003) .

The anedoctical evidence of the contribution of foreign born to ‘big thinking’ in the US is quite rich. One striking example is the following. In the last ten years, out of the 47 US-based Nobel laureates in Chemistry, Physics and Medicine, 25% (14 laureates) were not US-born. During the same time period the share of foreign-born in the general population was on average only 10%. From our perspective, such example is interesting because research in hard sciences is typically based on large team work.

As an alternative and perhaps more intuitive measure of diversity in a city we also use, in several parts of the analysis, the share of foreign-born residents.

Two fundamental concerns arise when we attempt to interpret these correlations as causal effects of diversity on the wages and rents of natives, namely a potential endogeneity bias and the possibility of spatial selection of natives. Endogeneity works as follows. Cities may experience an increase in the average wage from a positive economic shock, disproportionately attracting immigrants and thus witnessing an increase in diversity (this hypothesis is often referred to as ‘boom cities’). If this were the true story, the measured impact of diversity on wages and rents would be upwardly biased. To tackle this problem, we use instrumental variable estimations, a method widely used among economists that requires an ‘auxiliary’ variable whose exogenous variation affects diversity in a city (but not its productivity). Such a variable allows us to isolate that portion of the correlation between diversity and wages that is due to the causal effect of diversity on wages.

The spatial selection of native workers, on the other hand, is harder to deal with. In fact, if the presence of foreign-born people attracts a particular type of US born worker (call this group ‘tolerant’) and these workers also happen to be more productive, then the correlation between diversity and productivity of natives may be the effect of this selection rather than of complementarities or externalities with foreign-born. The best we can do is to control for observable characteristics of US-born residents and assume that their ‘tolerance’ is not highly correlated with the residual (unobserved) productivity. This issue, however, is certainly not settled with this paper and needs more research. We will come back to it in the final part of the paper.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on the economic consequences of immigration and cultural diversity. In particular we differentiate our work from (and reconcile it with) the common findings in labor economics that immigrants have negative or zero effects on the wages of US-born workers. Section 3 introduces our dataset and surveys the main stylized facts. Section 4 develops the theoretical model that is used to design and interpret our estimation strategy. Section 5 presents the results from the basic estimation, checks their robustness and tackles the issue of endogeneity. Section 6 discusses the results and provides some important caveats and qualifications to our conclusions.

Notable examples are Card and Krueger (1992 , 1993) , Cutler and Glaeser (1997) , Eckstein and Wolpin (1999) , Mason (2000) .

While in the present paper we simplify these effects into an overall effect of diversity on the TFP of US-born workers, in Ottaviano and Peri (2005) we separately model and analyze the effects of complementarieties across skills. We find that the (positive) empirical effects of migration on the average wage of US-born workers are very close to the theoretically calculated effects from the diversity of skills generated by immigrants.

In short, the standard labor literature assumes that immigrants and domestic workers within a particular skill group are homogeneous, so that immigration will shift the labor supply and change local wages in that skill group, the extent of which will depend on the mobility of domestic workers. Our approach takes a rather different stand. We believe that ‘place of birth’ can be a feature that differentiates individuals in terms of their attributes, and that this differentiation may have positive or negative effects on the productivity (through complementarities and externalities) and the utility (through taste for variety) of US-born residents. Moreover, we consider equilibrium variations of wages and rents in the long-run, relying on the assumption of mobility of native workers and firms across cities.

Berliant and Fujita (2004) model ‘assimilation’ as a result of team work: the very process of cooperative knowledge creation reduces the heterogeneity of team members through the accumulation of knowledge in common. In this respect, a perpetual reallocation of members across different teams may be necessary to keep creativity alive.

Finally, several studies in political economics have looked at the historical effects of cultural and ethnic diversity on the formation and quality of institutions. The traditional wisdom (confirmed by Easterly and Levine, 1997 ) had been that more fragmented (i.e. diverse) societies promote more conflicts and predatory behavior, stifling economic growth. However, recent studies have questioned that logic by showing that higher ethnic diversity is not necessarily harmful to economic development (see, e.g., Lian and Oneal, 1997 ). Collier (2001) finds that, as long as institutions are democratic, fractionalized societies perform better in the private sector than more homogenous ones. Framed within efficient institutions, diversity may serve as a valuable asset for society.

The questions we are interested in are the following. How does cultural diversity affect the US-born? Do they benefit or loose from the presence of foreign-born? How do we measure such benefits or costs?

We are able to extract interesting insights into these questions by analyzing the wage and rent distributions across cities, assuming that such distributions are the equilibrium outcomes of economically motivated choices. We assume that workers and firms are mobile across cities, and so can change their location in the long run if a productivity shock or a price differential were to arise. Since people can respond to changes in the local working and living environment of cities, the wage and rent variations that we observe in the long run should reflect a spatial equilibrium: workers and firms are indifferent among alternative locations as they have eliminated any systematic difference in indirect utility and profits through migration. Before formalizing these ideas in Section 4, we put our theoretical analysis into context by introducing our measure of cultural diversity (Section 3.1) and by establishing the main stylized facts about wages, rents and diversity in US cities (Section 3.3).

3.1. Data and diversity index

Data at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level for the United States are available from different sources. We use mostly the Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) for the years 1970 and 1990 in order to calculate wages and rents for specific groups of citizens in each MSA. We use the 1/100 sample from the 15% PUMS of 1970 and the 5% PUMS for 1990. We also use data from the ‘County and City Data Book’ from several years in order to obtain some aggregate variables, such as employment, income, population and spending on local public goods. We consider 160 Standard MSA's that could be consistently identified in each census year. Our dataset contains around 1,200,000 individual observations for 1990, and 500,000 for 1970. We use these to construct aggregate variables and indices at the MSA level. The reasons for focusing on metropolitan areas are two-fold. First, urban areas constitute closely connected economic units within which interactions are intense. Second, they exhibit a higher degree of diversity than non-urban areas because immigrants traditionally settle in large cities. While it is possible to construct data only on 160 metropolitan areas (using 1970 and 1990 PUMS of the US Bureau of Census) those areas include the most important US cities, spanning a wide range of variation in terms of cultural diversity. Adding all the other metropolitan areas would simply amount to adding more observations characterized by low and similar levels of diversity. This would certainly add some noise, but probably would not help much in the identification of the effect of diversity on wages and rents.

The housing market is less segmented by skills than the labor market. Therefore we use a larger age-range in order to calculate average rents.

Despite differences that may seem notable at first sight, most statistical measures of diversity are either formally equivalent or at least highly correlated when run on the same data set. See Maignan et al. (2003) for details.

In our case as M , the number of groups, is 36 the maximum for the index is 0.972. See Maignan et al. (2003) for further details.

The 1970 and 1990 PUMS data report the country of birth of each individual. We count as separate groups the migrants of each country of origin contributing at least 0.5% of the total foreign-born population working in the US. Migrants from other countries of origin are gathered in a residual group. This choice implies that we consider 35 countries of origin both in 1970 and in 1990. These groups constitute 92% of all foreign-born immigrants; the remaining 8% are merged into a single group. The complete list of countries for each census year is reported in the data appendix, while the largest 15 of these groups are reported in Table 1 . As the Table shows, between 1970 and 1990, the origin of immigrants has increasingly become Mexico; the share of foreign born, however, has increased as well, so that overall the diversity index has increased. As to the main countries of origin of immigrants, we note the well known shift from European countries towards Asian and Latin American countries.

Foreign Born living in 160 U.S. metropolitan areas 15 Largest Groups 1970, 1990

Source : Authors' elaborations on 1970 and 1990 PUMS census data.

3.2. Diversity across US cities

Table 2 shows the percentage of foreign-born and the diversity index for a representative group of metropolitan areas in the year 1990. To put into context the extent of diversity across US cities, each diversity index can be compared with the cross-country value of the index of linguistic fractionalization reported by the Atlas Narodov Mira and published in Taylor and Hudson (1972) for the year 1960. These values have been largely used in the growth literature (see e.g. Easterly and Levine, 1997 ; Collier, 2001 ). Since foreign-born immigrants typically use their country's mother tongue at home, thus signalling their country's cultural identity, our diversity index captures cultural and linguistic fragmentation for different US cities much as that index does for different countries in the world. The comparison is instructive. Diversified cities, such as New York or Los Angeles, have diversity indices between 0.5 and 0.6, which are comparable to the values calculated for countries such as Rhodesia (0.54), which is often disrupted by ethnic wars, or Pakistan (0.62), which also features a problematic mix of conflicting cultures. More homogenous cities, such as Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, exhibit a degree of fractionalization of only 0.05, which is the same as that of very homogenous European countries, such as Norway or Denmark in the sixties. Between these two extremes, US cities span a range of diversity that is about two-thirds of the range spanned by the nations of the world.

Diversity in representative Metropolitan Areas, 1990

Source : Authors' Elaborations on 1990 PUMS census data.

Table 2 also shows that, even though people born in Mexico constitute an important group in many cities, the variety of countries of origin of residents of US cities is still remarkable. Finally we note that there is a very high correlation between the diversity index and the share of foreign born in a city. The main reason an American city is considered ‘diverse’ is because there is a large percentage of foreign born living there, not necessarily because there is a high degree of diversity within the foreign born.

3.3. Stylized facts

The key empirical finding of our paper is readily stated: ceteris paribus, US-born workers living in cities with higher cultural diversity are paid, on average, higher wages, and pay higher rents, than those living in cities with lower cultural diversity . In Section 5 we show that this correlation not only survives the inclusion of several other control variables, but it is likely to be the result of causation running from diversity to wages and rents.

We report in Figures 1 and 2 , below, the correlation between the change of the diversity index for the 1970–1990 period, Δ( div c,t ), and the percentage change in the wage of the US-born, \({\Delta}\ \mathrm{ln}\ \left({\bar{w}}_{US,c}\right)\) ⁠ , or the percentage change in rents paid by the US-born, \({\Delta}\ \mathrm{ln}\left({\bar{r}}_{US,c}\right)\) in 160 metropolitan areas. The effect of fixed city characteristics, such as location or geographic amenities, are eliminated by differencing. The figures show the scatter-plots of these partial correlations and report the OLS regression line. Cities whose diversity increased more than the average, during the 20 years considered (such as Jersey City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose), have also experienced larger than average wage increases for their US-born residents. Similarly they also experienced a larger than average increase in rents. The OLS coefficient estimates imply that a city experiencing an increase of 0.09 in the diversity index (as Los Angeles did) would experience associated increases of 11 percentage points in the average wage and 17.7 percentage points in the average rent paid by US-born residents, relative to a city whose diversity index did not change at all (such as Cleveland).

Wages of US-born and diversity.

Rents of US-born and diversity.

4.1. The model

Roback's (1982) framework has been extensively applied to measure the value of local amenities or local factors of production. Examples include Rauch (1993) , Kahn (1995) , and Dekle and Eaton (1999) .

We consider an open system of a large number N of non-overlapping cities, indexed by c =1, …, N . There are two factors of production, labor and land. We assume that inter-city commuting costs are prohibitive, so that for all workers the city of work and residence coincides. We also ignore intra-city commuting costs, which allows us to focus on the inter-city allocation of workers.

The overall amount of labor available in the economy is equal to L . It is inelastically supplied by urban residents; without loss of generality, we choose units such that each resident supplies one unit of labor. Accordingly, we call L c the number of workers who work and reside in city c . Workers are all identical in terms of attributes that are relevant for market interactions. However, they differ in terms of non-market attributes, which exogenously classifies them into M different groups (‘cultural identities’) indexed by i =1,…, M . Hence, calling L i the overall number of workers belonging to group i , we have \({\sum}_{i=1}^{M}\ L_{i}\ =\ L\) ⁠ . In each city cultural diversity d c , measured in terms of the number (‘richness’) and relative size L ic (‘evenness’) of resident groups, enters both production and consumption as an effect that, in principle, can be positive or negative. To establish the existence and the sign of such effect is the final aim of the paper. While land is fixed among cities, it is nonetheless mobile between uses within the same city. 12 We call H c the amount of land available in city c . As to land ownership, we assume that the land of a city is owned by locally resident landlords. 13

The assumption of exogenous and constant land area of a city is harmless. The same implications would follow under the more realistic assumption that expanding the land area of a city comes at a cost because of internal commuting costs and lower quality of the marginal land.

This assumption is made only for analytical convenience. What is crucial for what follows is that the rental income of workers, if any, is independent of location, and thus does not affect migration choice. The alternative assumptions of absentee landlords or balanced ownership of land across all cities would also serve that purpose.

The contribution of diversity to total factor productivity could stem from imperfect substitutability of different groups as well as from pecuniary or learning externalities. For instance, Ottaviano and Peri (2004a) derive a production function similar to equation (5) with non-tradable intermediates and taste for variety.

Anticipating the empirical implementation of the model, by setting p c = 1 for all cities we are requiring the law-of-one-price to hold for tradable goods and non-tradable goods prices to be reasonably proxied by land rents. This is supported by the large positive correlation between local price indices and land rents at the SMSA level.

4.2. Identification: wage and rent equations

The spatial equilibrium.

5.1. Basic specifications

The least squares estimates of the regressions (14) and (15) are reported in specifications I and VII of Table 3 . Specification I shows the basic estimates for the wage equation, when we only include, besides state and year fixed effects, the average schooling of the considered group of white US-born males 40–50 years of age as a control. Specification VII considers the rent equation with only state and year fixed effects as controls. The estimated coefficients β 2 and γ 2 are both positive and statistically and economically significant. An increase in the diversity index by 0.1 (roughly the increase experienced by Los Angeles during the 1970–1990 period) is associated with a 13% increase in the average real wage of US natives and with a 19% increase in real rents.

Basic Wage and Rent Specifications

Specification I–VI: Dependent variable is logged average yearly wage of white, US-born, males 40–50 years expressed in 1990 US$.

Specification VII–IX: Dependent variable is logged average monthly rent per room paid by white, US born 16–65 years of age, expressed in 1990 US$.

Significant at 5%, * significant at 10%.

In parenthesis: heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors.

Similarly specifications VI and IX of Table 3 use the same controls as specification I and VII and decompose the effect of diversity (on wages and rents) into two parts. Specifically the diversity index can be expressed as the contribution of two factors. First, a city is more diverse if the overall group of foreign-born people is larger. Second, a city is more diverse if the foreign-born group is made up of a wider variety of groups. The diversity index can thus be written as a (non-linear) function of the share of foreign-born, or a diversity index can be calculated considering only the foreign born. We enter these two factors separately in specifications VI and IX in order to analyze their impact on wages and rents, respectively. Let us note that the share of foreign born is, by far, the most important component in determining the variation of the diversity index across cities. It explains, by itself, almost 90% of the index variation. It is not a surprise, therefore, to find that the share of foreigners is the most important contributor to the effect on wages and rents. An increase in the share of foreign born by 0.25 (experienced by Los Angeles during the considered period) is associated with a 14.5% increase in wages of US natives and a 28% increase in rents. The effect of the diversity of foreigners, on the other hand, has a positive but hardly significant impact.

The intermediate specifications (II to V for the wage equations and VIII for the rent equation) in Table 3 include alternative controls in order to check wether the correlation is robust to potential omitted variables. Specification II of the wage regression controls for the schooling of the group of US-born by including the shares of three groups (high school graduates, college dropouts and college graduates) among the total employed in each city, rather than simply the average years of schooling. Specification III includes a quartic polynomial in average schooling. While non-linear effects at different schooling levels may be relevant, here we see that the coefficient on diversity changes only marginally when we use different methods to control for education. We also run a specification (not reported) controlling for individual years of schooling in the construction of \(\mathrm{ln}\left({\bar{w}}_{US,c,t}\right)\) ⁠ , rather than at the second stage. Doing this reduces the coefficient on diversity somewhat to 1.00 (standard error equal to 0.32). All in all how we control for education does not seem to have a relevant effect on the coefficient on diversity. Specification IV weighs each observation (city) by its population. This control allows us to under-emphasize the role of small cities. The effect of diversity does not change much with this amendment; in fact it increases a bit (the coefficient is now equal to 1.37), which is a consequence of the fact that cities in which diversity has the largest impact (as seen in Figure 1 and 2 ) are indeed the largest cities, such as Los Angeles and New York. Specification V includes the log of employment as an additional control. On the one hand, if there are effects of employment density on productivity (as suggested by Ciccone and Hall, 1996 ) it may be relevant to control for employment; on the other hand employment (along with wages and rents) is determined endogenously as an equilibrium outcome in our model. As a consequence, including an endogenous variable as a control may bias the estimates of all coefficients. Fortunately we find that employment is not significantly correlated to wages (coefficient equal to 0.02 with standard error equal to 0.02), and its inclusion does not change the coefficient on diversity much. Omitting employment, therefore, is theoretically justified and empirically sound. These specifications reassure us that our basic specification captures both the correct sign and magnitude of the correlation between diversity and wages.

As for the rent regression, column VIII includes the average log income and log population of each city as controls. In reality, these variables may depend on several exogenous factors and may affect the value of housing. They are, however, endogenously determined in the equilibrium described in Section (4). In fact wages are the main determinant of income, while population is affected by internal migration. The two channels through which diversity can affect rents, described by our model, are either by increasing productivity (which pushes up income and rents), or by increasing the desirability of a city. When controlling for income and population, a residual positive effect of diversity would imply that people do value diversity per se, and are willing to bid up rents more than what would be implied only by higher income and higher population. The problem, however, is that including these two endogenous variables may induce a bias in the estimates of the coefficients of regression in equation (15) . The estimated coefficients in specification VIII show that including income and population reduces the effect of diversity by half. In particular income per capita is a main determinant of rents and enters the regression with a very significant coefficient. Even controlling for this effect through income, however, diversity still plays a very important role in determining rents (coefficient equal to 0.90). While we take this as a potential sign that diversity has a positive amenity value (it actually shifts the free migration condition in Figure 3 to the left) we are concerned with the endogeneity of the income and population variables, and so we omit them in the rest of the analysis. To summarize, diversity has positive and highly significant correlations with both wages (β 2 > 0) and land rents (γ 2 > 0). These positive correlations can be interpreted as consistent with a dominant and positive effect of diversity on productivity.

Finally, as we have mentioned that employment and population are endogenous variables in the equilibrium of our model, let us consider another correlation that reinforces our interpretation of a dominant positive effect of diversity on productivity. The theoretical model makes clear (see equation (6) ) that, in the presence of a positive productivity effect, the increase of diversity in a certain city shifts the local labor demand up, thus raising not only local wages but also local total employment. In contrast, a negative utility effect would be associated with higher wages but lower native employment. Table 4 reports the correlation between changes in diversity and changes in employment as well as the population of US cities between 1970 and 1990. If the labor supply curve had shifted up and the labor demand curve remained fixed, we should observe an increase in wages but a decrease in total employment caused by the outflow of US-born workers. The Table rather shows positive effects of diversity on both employment and population, consistent with the idea that there was no outflow of natives counterbalancing immigration. This is consistent with a dominant upward shift of labor demand as expected in the presence of a dominant positive productivity effect.

Correlation between growth in diversity and in employment/population

Heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors are reported in parentheses.

5.2. Checks of robustness

If the reader is interested in the details of each regression and in a more thorough discussion of each specification we suggest reading the working paper Ottaviano and Peri (2004b) .

Wage regression: robustness checks

Dependent variable: ln average yearly wage to white, US born, males 40–50 years old expressed in 1990 US$. The coefficients in column 1 correspond to different regressions in each row. The coefficients in column 2 and 3 correspond to different regressions for each row.

(1) Basic: specification from Table 3 column I (for coefficient 1) and Column VI (for coefficients 2 and 3).

(2) Includes average years of schooling of foreign born.

(3) Includes the share of US-born outside the state in which they live.

(4) Includes the share of non-white people in working age.

(5) Include the spending per capita on local government services.

(6) Includes the spending in education per capita.

(7) Includes ln(Employment) of the group US-born, white males 40–50 years old.

(8) Includes all the variables in (1)–(7) together as controls.

(9) Excluding from the regression MSAs in the biggest immigrations states: CA, FL, NY.

(10) Regression in changes including 49-state fixed-effects.

(11) Uses the wage of the group white, US, born, males, 30–40 years old as dependent variable.

Heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors are reported in parentheses.s

Rent regression: robustness checks

Dependent variable: ln average monthly rent paid by white, US born, expressed in 1990 US$. The coefficients in column 1 correspond to different regressions in each row. The coefficients in column 2 and 3 correspond to different regressions for each row.

(1) Basic: specification from Table 4 column VII (for coefficient 1) and column IX (for coefficients 2 and 3).

(3) Includes the share of US born outside the state in which they live.

(5) Include the Spending per capita on local government services.

(6) Includes the Spending in education per capita.

(7) Includes the ln(population) of white US-born males.

(9) Excluding from the regression MSAs in the biggest immigrations states (CA, FL, NY).

(10) Regression in changes including 49 state fixed-effects.

The positive effect of diversity on the wage of the US-born may simply be a result of the foreigners' measurable average education. Specifications (2) in Tables 5 and 6 include the average years of schooling of the foreign-born workers as an additional control variable in the wage and rent regressions respectively. While analyzing human capital externalities using average schooling has been a common practice ( Rauch, 1993 ; Moretti, 2004 ), if workers with different schooling levels are imperfect substitutes, or if the distribution of their skills matters, then average schooling may not be a sufficient statistic to capture the presence of complementarity or externalities. The estimated effects of diversity on wages and rents remain significant and positive when we include this control. Interestingly, the effect of the average schooling of the foreign-born on the wages of the US-born (not reported) is not significant, while it is small and positive on the rents of the US-born. This result tells us that the simple average schooling of the foreign-born does not fully capture their true ‘value.’ Not only might the skill distribution of the foreign-born matter, but their abilities may be differentiated from (and complementary to) those of natives, even at the same schooling level. When we decompose the overall diversity (column 2 and 3 in the Tables) by including separately the share of foreign born and their diversity, we still find a significant and positive effect of the share of foreign born on both rents and wages, while the diversity of foreigners has a significant positive impact on wages but not on rents.

It may be the case, however, as argued by Borjas (2001) , that the US-born move away from cities in which immigrants go because they look for different amenities or better wages. However, both our results shown in Table 4 (population increases where diversity increases) as well as recent studies by Card (2001) and Card and Di Nardo (2000) do not find evidence of this ‘displacement effect’.

Some sociologists have advanced the hypothesis that environments which are tolerant towards diversity are more productive and more pleasant to live in. Along similar lines, Richard Florida (2002a , 2002b) has argued that cities with larger numbers of artists and bohemian professionals are more innovative in high tech sectors. It is likely that part of our correlations may actually depend on this positive attitude of cities towards diversity. However, to show that there is something specific to the presence of foreign-born, we include in specification (4) of Tables 5 and 6 the share of US-born people identifying themselves as ‘non-white.’ Since we consider only US-born people, this index essentially captures the white-black composition of a city. The coefficients on this variable (not reported) turn out to be positive in the wage regression (0.20) and negative in the rent regression (−0.22). We may interpret these results as (weak) evidence of the aversion white US-born individuals feel living close to large non-white (US-born) communities. The standard errors however (in both cases around 0.2), render the estimated coefficients insignificant. As to the coefficients of the diversity index, they are still positive, significant (except in one case for the rent regression), and similar to previous estimates. Thus, in spite of the more ambiguous effect of ethnic diversity, diversity in terms of the country of birth maintains its importance.

Several public services in US cities are supplied by local governments. Public schools, public health care, and public security are all desirable local services. Therefore, cities whose quality of public services has improved in our period of observation may have experienced both an increase in the share of foreign born (possibly because they are larger users of these services) and a rise in property values. From the County and City Databook we have gathered data on the spending of local government services per person in a city and on its breakdown across different categories, particularly in education. Specification (5) of Tables 5 and 6 includes overall spending by local government, whereas specification (6) includes spending on just education, a very important determinant of the quality of schools. The effect of public spending per person on rents (not reported) is positive in both specifications; however, its inclusion does not change the effects of diversity.

If different groups of workers are imperfect substitutes, then even among US natives the average wage of white males 40–50 years of age may be affected by their relative supply. While there is no clear reason to believe that the relative size of this group is correlated with the diversity of a city, it may be appropriate to control for the (log) employment of this group, and not just for total employment. The corresponding results are reported in specification (7) of Table 5 , which shows that the coefficient of the diversity index is still equal to 1.32. Specification (7) of Table 6 considers instead the group of white US-born males as potentially competing for similar housing, and therefore includes the log of their population together with that of total population. This specification is very similar to specification (4), which includes the share of non-whites and produces similar estimates: 1.50 for the coefficient on diversity and 0.96 for the coefficient on the share of foreign born.

Some authors (see e.g. Sivitanidou and Wheaton, 1992 ) have argued that the institutional constraints on land use (‘zoning’) can affect land values. Thus, higher property values may be associated with more efficient institutional constraints in the presence of market failures. This effect, however, should be captured by our local public goods measures.

Specifications (9) and (10) of Tables 5 and 6 push our data as far as they can go. Specification (9) estimates the wage and rent regressions excluding the three states with the highest shares of foreign-born, namely California, New York and Florida. The aim is to check whether a few highly diverse cities in those states generate the correlations of diversity with wages and rents. This turns out not to be the case. In the wage regression the coefficient on diversity decreases somewhat but remains both positive and significant. In the rent equation the coefficient on diversity grows larger but also becomes less precisely estimated. In general, however, there is no evidence that in the long run the effect of diversity is different for high immigration states than low immigration states.

In Specification (10), rather than use city and year dummies, we use the differences of the basic variables between 1990 and 1970. We also include state fixed effects to control for differences in the state-specific growth rates of wages and rents. In so doing we identify the effects of diversity on wages and rents through the variation across cities within states. This is an extremely demanding specification as we are probably eliminating most of the variation needed to identify the results by estimating 48 dummies using 160 observations. Remarkably, the positive effect of diversity on productivity still stands, and its point estimate is similar to those of previous specifications. The effect of diversity on rents, however, while still positive, is no longer significant.

We perform one more check in specification (11) of Table 5 in order to verify that our results survive when we consider groups that are more mobile across cities than 40 to 50 year-old workers. We estimate the wage equation using the average wage of white US-born males between 30 and 40 years of age. The coefficients on diversity and the share of foreign born are still significantly positive, equal to 1.20 and 0.69, respectively.

The results of SUR estimations are available in Ottaviano and Peri (2004b) .

In summary, most wage and rent regressions yield positive and significant coefficients for both the diversity index and the share of foreign born. The diversity of the foreign born also has a positive effect but this effect is less often significant. We do not find any specification such that the coefficients on the diversity variable are simultaneously not significant in both the wage and the rent regressions. Moreover, each single estimate delivers positive estimates of diversity on wages and rents of natives. Therefore, our identification (13) allows us to conclude that no specification contradicts the hypothesis of a positive productivity effect of diversity .

5.3. Endogeneity and instrumental variables

Short of a randomized experiment in which diversity across cities is changed randomly, we cannot rest assured that our correlations reveal any causal link from diversity to wages and rents. Nonetheless, some steps towards tackling the endogeneity problem can be taken using instrumental variables (IV) estimation. Our instruments should be correlated with the change in the diversity of cities between 1970 and 1990, and not otherwise correlated with changes in wages and rents. We construct our main instrument building on the fact that foreigners tend to settle in ‘enclaves’ where other people from their country of origin already live ( Winters et al., 2001 ; Munshi, 2003 ). Following Card (2002) and Saiz (2003b) we construct the ‘predicted’ change in the number of immigrants from each country in each city during the observed period. The predicted change is based on the actual shares of people from each country in each city at the beginning of the period, and the total immigration rate from each country of origin to the US during the whole period. By construction the ‘predicted’ change does not depend on any city-specific shock during the observed period. We then observe that the stocks and flows of immigrants tend to be larger in cities that are closer to important ‘gateways’ into the US. By contrast, the stocks of the native born and their changes over time are much less dependent on their proximity to these gateways. Therefore, as additional instruments, we also add the distance of a city from the main gateways into the US after having tested for the exogeneity of these instruments. The inclusion of more instruments, as long as they are exogenous, should improve our estimates while still correcting for the potential endogeneity bias. We now describe the instruments and the estimation results in the following two sections.

5.3.1. Shift-Share methodology

We construct our main instrument by adopting the ‘shift-share methodology,’ used by Card (2001) and more recently by Saiz (2003b) , to migration in MSA's. Immigrants tend to settle, at least initially, where other immigrants from the same country already reside (immigration enclaves). Therefore, we can use the share of residents of an MSA in 1970 for each country of birth, and attribute to each group the growth rate of that group within the whole US population in the 1970–1990 time period. In so doing we compute the predicted composition of the city based on its 1970 composition and attribute to each group the average growth rate of its share in the US population. Once we have constructed these ‘predicted’ shares for 1990 we can calculate a ‘predicted’ diversity index for each city in 1990.

Tables 7 and 8 present the results of the IV estimation of the wage and rent regressions. Relative to previous regressions, some adjustments in the grouping of countries of birth are needed. This is because as we input the shares in 1990 based on the initial shares in 1970, we need to identify the same countries of origin across census years. This is achieved by allocating more than one country of birth to the same group, as some countries have disappeared or changed during the period. In so doing, we follow the classification adopted by Card (2001) and described in the data appendix.

Wage regression. IV estimation, instrument: shift-share imputed diversity

Dependent variable: change between 1970 and 1990 in ln average yearly wage of white, US born, males, 40–50 years, expressed in 1990 US $.

Instrumental variable: imputed change in diversity index and share of foreign born, using the shift-share method described in the text.

Rent regression. IV estimation, instrument: shift-share imputed diversity

Dependent variable: Change between 1970 and 1990 in logged average yearly rent of white, US-born, aged 16–65, expressed in 1990 US$.

Instrumental variable: imputed change in diversity index and share of foreign born, using the shift-share method, described in the text.

In Tables 7 and 8 , column 1 reports the OLS estimates of the basic specification in which we control for schooling using the change in average years of schooling in the city (Δ schooling). The point estimates of the OLS specification are very similar to our previous estimates ( Table 3 , columns I and VII), confirming that the reclassification by country groups has only small effects. In column 2, as we are running the specifications in differences (rather than in levels with fixed effects), we also check that the implicit treatment of long-run effects as equilibrium effects is appropriate. In particular we include the initial values of average wages and rents (coefficients on those variables are not reported), in order to control for the possibility that cities were not at a long-run equilibrium at the beginning of the period (1970), so that their dynamic behavior exhibits ‘conditional convergence’. The estimated effects of diversity do not change much, and are statistically not different from the previous estimates.

As for the IV estimates of columns 3 and 4, we notice that the first stage regressions (of the endogenous measure of diversity on the instrument) imply that the imputed diversity indices are good predictors of the actual ones, explaining 31% of their variation (orthogonal to the other regressors) when all states are included. The exclusion of large immigration states, however, reduces significantly the partial R 2 of the first stage regression to 17%.

The estimated effect of diversity on wages is reported in column 3 of Table 7 . Its value (0.98) is close to the OLS estimate and significantly positive. When we exclude the high-immigration states (column 4 of Table 7 ), the effect of diversity is estimated to be positive but significant only at the 10% confidence level. However, the main problem encountered when we exclude California, Florida and New York is that, as just mentioned, the instruments lose much of their explanatory power (the partial R 2 of the excluded instruments drops to 0.17). Therefore, insignificance is mostly driven by large standard errors, rather than by evidence of any endogeneity bias (i.e., changes in point estimates).

Columns 3 and 4 in Table 8 show that the rent regression exhibits a similar qualitative pattern but sharper results. Using the shift-share instruments, the diversity index has a positive and significant effect in each specification. Including all states, the IV estimates are 30% higher than the OLS estimates (although, due to the large standard error we cannot reject the hypothesis that they are equal). When we exclude California, Florida, and New York (specification 4 of Table 8 ), both the estimate and the standard error increase significantly. The point estimates of the effect of diversity are still firmly in the positive range. Somewhat surprising (possibly driven by the exclusion of some ‘perverse’ outliers such as Miami, see Figure 2 ) is the very large (and imprecisely estimated) effect of diversity on rents in this specification.

5.3.2. Gateways into the US

We can increase the set of instruments by noting the fact that immigrants tend to enter the US through a few ‘gateways,’ or through the border. As a consequence, the total number of foreign born in city c at time t , F ct , as well as the total increase in foreign born in city c , Δ F ct , depend negatively on the distance from the closest gateway. As long as the total number of US-born residents in a city, N ct , does not depend (or depends to a lesser extent) on that distance, we have that both the share of foreign born, F ct /( F ct + N ct ), and its change are negatively correlated with the distance from the immigration gateways into the US.

Each year the US Office of Tourism publishes the percentage of inbound travellers by point of entry. Looking at this data for the eighties, we see that the three main gateways were New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. About 30% of foreign (immigrant and non-immigrant) travellers entered the US through the airports and ports of these cities. Moreover, due to the benefits of networks, the costs of travelling, and the costs of spreading information, immigrants were more likely to settle in cities closer to these gateways. A similar argument can be made for Canadian and Mexican immigrants. For them, it seems reasonable to assume that the US borders with their own countries constitute the natural place of entry into the US. Thus, as before, cities closer to these borders were more likely to receive Canadian or Mexican immigrants during the 1970–1990 period.

These considerations suggest the use of the overall distance of a city from the main gateways into the US (New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and the US borders with Canada and Mexico) to instrument for its diversity index (heavily dependent on the share of foreign-born). This distance should be negatively correlated with diversity but not with shocks to wages and rents.

The exact form of our test of exogeneity can be find in Woolridge (2001) , 124–125. Intuitively the test checks wether the restriction that excludes the extra-instruments from the second-stage regression is rejected or not by the data. If it is not rejected the assumption of exogeneity stands.

Tables 9 and 10 report the first and second stage estimates of the described IV regressions using wages and rents, respectively, as the dependent variable. Column 1 of Table 9 shows the basic specification of the wage regression; column 2 includes 48 state fixed-effects; column 3 excludes the biggest immigration states. Similarly column 1 of Table 10 includes the basic specification while column 2 and 3 exclude from the regression coastal cities and cities in California, Florida and New York as a check for potential outliers driving the results. The first stage regressions confirm that our excluded instruments are excellent: in the first stage they explain about 70% of the variation in diversity that is orthogonal to the other regressors. Even including state effects, more than 50% of the residual variation in diversity is still explained by the instruments. This increases the power of instrument, relative to Table 7 and 8 and may result in more precise estimates.

Wage regression. IV estimation, instruments are distance from ‘Gateways’ and imputed diversity

Dependent variable: change between 1970 and 1990 in ln average yearly wage of white, US-born, males, 40–50 years, expressed in 1990 US$.

Significant at 5%, * significant at 10%

Test of over-identifying restrictions, from Woolridge (2001) pp. 124–125, cannot reject the joint exogeneity of instruments at the 5% confidence level. The value of the test statistic is 3.2 for the first specification, 4.5 for the second and 3.7 for the third. The statistic is distributed as a chi-square with 3 degrees of freedom under the null hypothesis of no Instrument included in the second stage equation.

Rent regression. IV estimation, instruments are distance from ‘Gateways’ and imputed diversity.

Dependent variable: change between 1970 and 1990 in ln average monthly rent paid by white, US-born, expressed in 1990 US$.

Test of over-identifying restrictions, from Woolridge (2001) pp. 124–125, cannot reject the joint exogeneity of instruments at the 5% confidence level. The value of the test statistic is 4.8 for the first specification, 7.2 for the second and 4.5 for the third. The statistic is distributed as a chi-square with 3 degrees of freedom under the null hypothesis of no instrument included in the second stage equation.

The estimates of specification 1 ( Table 9 and 10 ) confirm that the effects of diversity on wages and rents are positive and large. The estimated coefficient is significant and very large for wages (1.50) as well as for rents (1.48). Moreover, the IV estimates of the effect on wages are somewhat higher than the OLS ones; hence we are reassured that no significant (endogeneity-driven) downward OLS bias exists. For the wage regressions we obtain a positive and significant effect of diversity when controlling for 48 state fixed effects (specification 2 of Table 9 ) and when eliminating coastal cities (specifications 3 of Table 9 ). The last specification has quite large standard errors, but it certainly reinforces our thesis that the foreign-born have a positive effect in non-coastal cities as well. As for the rent regressions, the share of foreigners once again has a positive and significant effect in specifications 2 and 3 of Table 10 (excluding coastal cities and excluding the largest immigration states). Again, somewhat oddly, and probably due to the elimination of some outliers, the estimated effect on rents increases significantly in specifications 2 and 3.

All in all the results using shift-share instruments seem to confirm very strongly the positive effect of diversity on wages and rents of natives. In particular, considering all the IV regressions, we find no specification in which the coefficients of diversity are not significant in either the wage or rent equations. Moreover the point estimates are always robustly positive (although sometimes they are not very precise due to instrument weakness). Thus, on the basis of the discussion in subsection 2, we can conclude that our data support the hypothesis of a positive productivity effect of diversity with causation running from diversity to productivity of US workers .

We have looked at US metropolitan areas as a system of open cities in which cultural diversity can affect the productivity and utility of natives. In principle, the effects of diversity can be positive or negative. We have considered a simple model that handles all possible cases (i.e. positive or negative effects on productivity and utility), and we have designed a simple identification procedure to figure out which case receives empirical support based on cross-city wage and rent variations. We have showed that higher wages and higher rents for US natives are significantly correlated with higher diversity. This result has survived several robustness checks against possible alternative explanations based on omitted variables and instrumental variables estimation.

Given our identification procedure, these findings are consistent with a dominant positive effect of diversity on productivity: a more multicultural urban environment makes US-born citizens more productive . To the best of our knowledge, in terms of both data and identification procedure, our results are new. We need to add two caveats, however, to these conclusions. First, while we are confident that the identified positive correlation between diversity and wage-rents is a robust feature of the data, our interpretation of a positive effect of diversity on productivity is not the only possible one. A plausible, and not less interesting one, is that spatial selection of US born residents in cities with high or low diversity may reflect some of their characteristics. For instance, people with higher education, higher international experience, and higher exposure to culture and news may be more appreciative of diversity. They may also be different from other US natives in several characteristics that are related to productivity. If this is true, ‘tolerant’ cities are more productive due to the characteristics of US-born residents rather than to the ‘diversity’ of these cities. Our current and future research is proceeding in the direction of analyzing this selection effect better and trying to determine which factor (diversity or tolerance) is more relevant for productivity (in fact both effects are likely to play important roles).

Secondly, even assuming the existence of a positive effect of foreign-born residents on the productivity of US natives, we have not yet opened the ‘black box’ to analyze theoretically and empirically what the channels are through which that effect works. The complementarity of skills between the US and foreign born seems a very promising avenue of research. Even at the same level of education, problem solving, creativity and adaptability may differ between native and foreign-born workers so that reciprocal learning may take place. Another promising avenue is that foreign-born workers may provide services that are not perfectly substitutable with those of natives. An Italian stylist, a Mexican cook and a Russian dancer simply provide different services that their US-born counterparts cannot. Because of a taste for variety, this may increase the value of total production. We need to analyze more closely the effects in different sectors and on different skill groups in order to gain a better understanding of these channels. Overall our findings look plausible and encouraging, leaving to future research the important goal of pursuing further the analysis of the mechanisms through which foreign-born residents affect the US economy.

A.1 Data for MSA's

The data on cultural diversity and foreign-born are obtained from the 1970–1990 Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the US Census. We selected all people in working age (16–65 year) in each year and we identified the city where they lived using the SMSA code for 1990, while in 1970 we used the county group code to identify the metropolitan area. We used the variable ‘Place of Birth’ in order to identify the country of origin of the person. We considered only the countries of origin in which was born at least 0.5 % of the foreign-born working age population. We obtained 35 groups for 1970 as well as for 1990.

We used the Variable ‘Salary and Wage’ to measure the yearly wage income of each person. We transformed the wage in real 1990 US$$ by deflating it with the national GDP deflator. The years of schooling for individuals are measured using the variable ‘higrad’ for the 1970 census, which indicates the highest grade attended, while for 1990 the variable ‘grade completed’ is converted into years of schooling using Park's (1994) correspondence Table 4 . Average rents are calculated using gross monthly rent per room (i.e. rent divided by number of rooms) expressed in real 1990 US$ terms. The data on total city employment, total local public spending, and public spending in education are from the County and City Databook.

The list of metropolitan areas used in our study is reported in the following table.

Name and state of the cities used

A.2 Grouping by country of birth

In Tables from 1 to 8 we consider the diversity index constructed using 35 countries of origin of immigrants which top the list of all countries of origin plus a residual group called ‘others’. These account for more than 90 % of all foreign-born, both in 1970 and 1990, and a country that is not in this list supplies at most 0.5 % of all foreign-born living in the US. Here is the list of the non-residual countries, in alphabetical order. For year 1970 the countries are: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Sweden, Syria, Ukraine, USSR, Yugoslavia, Others. For 1990 the countries are: Argentina, Canada, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hong-Kong, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, El Salvador, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, USSR, Vietnam, Yugoslavia.

In Tables 9 and 10 , in order to have the same groups in 1970 and 1990, we allocate more than one non-residual country to the same group based on geographical proximity. Our fifteen groups are almost the same as those defined and used in Card (2001) . This is the list: Mexico, Caribbean Countries, Central America, China-Hong-Kong-Singapore, South America, South East Asia, Korea and Japan, Philippines, Australia-New Zealand-Canada-UK, India and Pakistan, Russia and Central Europe, Turkey, North Africa and Middle East, Northwestern Europe and Israel, South-western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Cuba.

We are grateful to Gilles Duranton, Michael Storper and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Alberto Alesina, Richard Arnott, David Card, Masa Fujita, Ed Glaeser, Vernon Henderson, Eliana LaFerrara, David Levine, Doug Miller, Enrico Moretti, Dino Pinelli, Matt Turner as well as workshop participants at FEEM Milan, RSAI Philadelphia, UBC Vancouver, UC Berkeley and UCLA International Institute for helpful discussions and suggestions. We thank Elena Bellini for outstanding research assistance. Ahmed Rahman provided extremely competent assistance with the editing of the article. Ottaviano gratefully acknowledges financial support from Bocconi University and FEEM. Peri gratefully acknowledge financial support form UCLA International Institute. Errors are ours.

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• Academia - Multiculturalism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Multiculturalism
• Table Of Contents

multiculturalism , the view that cultures , races , and ethnicities , particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgment of their differences within a dominant political culture .

That acknowledgment can take the forms of recognition of contributions to the cultural life of the political community as a whole, a demand for special protection under the law for certain cultural groups, or autonomous rights of governance for certain cultures; identity politics may be tied to each of these actions. Multiculturalism is both a response to the fact of cultural pluralism in modern democracies and a way of compensating cultural groups for past exclusion, discrimination , and oppression. Most modern democracies comprise members with diverse cultural viewpoints, practices, and contributions. Many minority cultural groups have experienced exclusion or the denigration of their contributions and identities in the past. Multiculturalism seeks the inclusion of the views and contributions of diverse members of society while maintaining respect for their differences and withholding the demand for their assimilation into the dominant culture.

Multiculturalism stands as a challenge to liberal democracy . In liberal democracies, all citizens should be treated equally under the law by abstracting the common identity of “citizen” from the real social, cultural, political, and economic positions and identities of real members of society. That leads to a tendency to homogenize the collective of citizens and assume a common political culture that all participate in. However, that abstract view ignores other politically salient features of the identities of political subjects that exceed the category of citizen, such as race, religion, class, and sex. Although claiming the formal equality of citizens, the liberal democratic view tends to underemphasize ways in which citizens are not in fact equal in society. Rather than embracing the traditional liberal image of the melting pot into which people of different cultures are assimilated into a unified national culture, multiculturalism generally holds the image of a tossed salad to be more appropriate. Although being an integral and recognizable part of the whole, diverse members of society can maintain their particular identities while residing in the collective.

Some more radical multicultural theorists have claimed that some cultural groups need more than recognition to ensure the integrity and maintenance of their distinct identities and contributions. In addition to individual equal rights, some have advocated for special group rights and autonomous governance for certain cultural groups. Because the continued existence of protected minority cultures ultimately contributes to the good of all and the enrichment of the dominant culture, those theorists have argued that the preserving of cultures that cannot withstand the pressures to assimilate into a dominant culture can be given preference over the usual norm of equal rights for all.

Some examples of how multiculturalism has affected the social and political spheres are found in revisions of curricula , particularly in Europe and North America , and the expansion of the Western literary and other canons that began during the last quarter of the 20th century. Curricula from the elementary to the university levels were revised and expanded to include the contributions of minority and neglected cultural groups. That revision was designed to correct what is perceived to be a falsely Eurocentric perspective that overemphasizes the contributions of white European colonial powers and underemphasizes the contributions made by indigenous people and people of colour. In addition to that correction, the contributions that cultural groups have made in a variety of fields have been added to curricula to give special recognition for contributions that were previously ignored. The establishment of African American History Month , National Hispanic Heritage Month , and Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States is an example of the movement. The addition of works by members of minority cultural groups to the canons of literary, historical, philosophical, and artistic works further reflects the desire to recognize and include multicultural contributions to the broader culture as a whole.

Essay on Multiculturalism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Multiculturalism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Multiculturalism

What is multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is when people from different places, with different ways of living and different beliefs, come together in one society. It’s like a salad bowl, where each unique ingredient adds to the flavor, making it better.

Benefits of Multiculturalism

When we live in a place with many cultures, we learn a lot. We get to try new foods, celebrate different festivals, and make friends with different backgrounds. This teaches us to be kind and open-minded.

Challenges of Multiculturalism

Sometimes, people find it hard to understand each other’s ways. This can lead to disagreements. But, talking and learning about each other’s cultures can help solve these problems.

Multiculturalism in Schools

Schools are great for multiculturalism. Kids learn about the world’s cultures and languages. This helps them become better citizens of the world, ready to work and live with all kinds of people.

250 Words Essay on Multiculturalism

Living in a multicultural society is like having the world at your doorstep. You get to learn about other ways of life without traveling far. For example, you can try different types of food, listen to new music, and make friends with people who have different stories to tell. This can help us become more understanding and accepting of others.

Sometimes, when people from different backgrounds live together, they might not agree on everything. It can be hard to understand someone who is very different from you. But it’s important to talk and listen to each other. This is how we can solve problems and live together peacefully.

Learning from Each Other

In a place full of different cultures, we can learn a lot from each other. We can see that even though we might do things differently, we often have the same hopes and dreams. By sharing our cultures, we can teach each other new things and grow together.

In conclusion, multiculturalism is about different cultures living together and learning from one another. It has its ups and downs, but it makes our world a more exciting and caring place.

500 Words Essay on Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is like a big garden with many different types of flowers. Each flower has its own color, shape, and smell. This garden is more beautiful because it has so many kinds of flowers. In the same way, multiculturalism means having people from many different cultures and backgrounds living together in one place. Just like each flower adds beauty to the garden, every culture adds something special to a country or community.

In a multicultural school, you might have friends from different countries. You can learn from them about their holidays, how they dress, and what games they play. This is not just fun, but it also helps you understand how people see the world in different ways. By learning about other cultures, you become smarter and more understanding. It’s like each new friend is a new book full of exciting stories and lessons.

Sometimes, having many cultures together can be hard. People might not understand each other because they speak different languages or have different customs. It’s like when you play a team game, and everyone has different rules. To play well together, you need to learn the same rules. In multiculturalism, the “rules” are respect and kindness. When everyone follows these rules, it’s easier to get along.

How to Support Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is like a colorful quilt. Each piece of fabric is different, but when sewn together, they make something warm and beautiful. Living in a multicultural world helps us learn, grow, and understand each other better. It’s important to remember that even though we might look or speak differently, inside, we all have feelings, dreams, and the need to be loved and respected. So, let’s celebrate the beauty of every culture and build a world where everyone feels like they belong.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

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IELTS Mentor "IELTS Preparation & Sample Answer"

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Ielts essay # 578 - multi-cultural societies bring more benefits than drawbacks to a country, ielts writing task 2/ ielts essay:, multi-cultural societies, in which there is a mixture of different ethnic peoples, bring more benefits than drawbacks to a country., to what extent do you agree or disagree.

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• The World's Most Multicultural Cities

Around the world, cities are becoming more and more diverse, and increasingly multicultural. Large metropolitan cities are mosaics of culture and heritage, blending belief systems, habits, cultures, foods and style from all over the world. This mix of ethnic backgrounds makes for rich and vibrant cities where difference is celebrated, and neighbours from differnet backgrounds coexist in harmony. This list looks at some of the most multicultural cities from around the world. 

New York City

Toronto is generally thought to be the most multicultural city in the world. As the largest city in Canada - one of the most multicultural countries in the world - it boasts a large population of people from all walks of life and a variety of cultural backgrounds. Toronto has a population of roughly 3 million people, and of that, roughly half were born outside of Canada, and/or are part of a ‘visible minority.’ The largest ethnic groups in Toronto are East Asian and South Asian, though populations from the United Kingdom and Ireland , as well as Italy are also large. Additionally, the city is home to a wide variety of neighbourhoods and communities which celebrate different cultures. Along with Chinatown and Little Italy, Toronto has Greektown, Koreatown, Little India, Roncesvalles Village (unofficially Little Poland), Portugal Village, and Little Malta. 

Another highly multicultural city is Sydney, Australia . Sydney is a popular city to immigrate to, and roughly 40%-50% of the population (which is an estimated 5.3 million) has moved to Sydney from elsewhere. Due to its location, many people from nearby countries such as China, Hong Kong , the Philippines and Japan can be found in Sydney, as well as a strong population of people from commonwealth countries, specifically the United Kingdom. This diverse and booming city is a safe and successful city full of culture, food and wine, and recreation opportunities that draw visitors and immigrants from all over the world.

As one of the larger cities in the world, with a population of 8.4 million people, New York is a bustling hive of activity and culture. At least a third of its extensive population was born somewhere other than the United States, and it is estimated that as many as 800 different languages or dialects are spoken in the city, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. Neighbourhoods, restaurants and cultural centres sit side by side, celebrating ethnicities from all over the world. In fact, the headquarters for the United Nations is located in New York, due both to its large size and population, and its multicultural nature.

Paris is one of the most multicultural cities in Europe, and has a population of roughly 2 million people, or 11 million if including the surrounding suburban areas. At least 20% of people living in Paris are considered first generation immigrants, while this number expands to 40% if you factor in second generation immigrants - that is, people with at least one parent who moved to Paris from somewhere else. The majority of Parisian residents who live but were not born in the city, are actually not considered to be immigrants, though, as they relocated from other French overseas regions, such as the French West Indies, of French-speaking countries in Africa. Aside from these French regions, though, citizens of Paris can be found from all across Europe, Maghreb, Egypt, Turkey, Asia and the Americas, making for an extremely diverse city.

Like Paris, London is one of the most multicultural cities within Europe. Approximately one third of the people living in London were born outside of the United Kingdom. Also, there are thought to be more than 200 different languages spoken in the city at any given time. London is an extremely cosmopolitan city, featuring people, food, styles, and cultural buildings from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Roughly 270 or so different nationalities are represented in London and this can be seen throughout the various neighbourhoods and areas that make up the mosaic of people in this major city.

Sao Paulo is thought to be the most multicultural city in South America. The city is located in southeastern Brazil, and is a bustling busy city full of people from all over the world. While tourism is especially high here, there are also strong populations of people who have moved to São Paulo from elsewhere. Various neighbourhoods such as Liberdade, the Japanese quarter, and Bixiga, the Italian quarter, are nestled in and amongst the Brazilian neighbourhoods. Together, these cultures form a diverse atmosphere where cuisine, religion, and ethnic backgrounds come together in harmony.

Amsterdam is an extremely welcoming and friendly city in the heart of the Netherlands . It is the largest city in the country, and is home to people from over 175 different backgrounds. Amsterdam is specifically known for being a safe and tolerant place for asylum seekers, and as such often has immigrants from a variety of countries who likely do not speak Dutch. However, this city is extremely multilingual, and offers a wide range of language classes to help new residents adjust. Similarly, they have a festival known as DRONGO Festival, which aims to celebrate the many languages spoken throughout the city. 

Los Angeles

Like New York City, Los Angeles, on California’s west coast, is another one of the United States' most multicultural cities. Los Angeles is a popular city for its weather and sunshine, as well as for being a ‘land of opportunity.’ Even within the United States , many Americans relocated to L.A. in order to follow their dreams of art-related fame or fortune. Similarly, there are many people from other countries who have relocated to L.A. due to its booming art and culture scene - namely, Hollywood, but new residents also move here more widely in search of a new life in America. The city is unique in that it does not have a strong majority population, and there are people stemming from over 140 different countries, speaking nearly 100 different languages. An abundance of culturally diverse neighbourhoods including Latino communities, Little Tokyo, Koreatown and the like, help to make Los Angeles the multicultural hub that it is today.

As the world grows, and globalization continues to be the norm, the mixing, melding, and celebrating of different cultures and ethnicities flourishes. Major cities are becoming increasingly multicultural as people from different backgrounds relocate for work, pleasure, asylum, or family reasons. As the world becomes figuratively smaller, large cities become more and more multicultural, and the harmony of sharing in your neighbours culture will hopefully continue to grow. 

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Cultural Diversity Essay & Community Essay Examples

If you’ve started to research college application requirements for the schools on your list, you might have come across the “cultural diversity essay.” In this guide, we’ll explore the cultural diversity essay in depth. We will compare the cultural diversity essay to the community essay and discuss how to approach these kinds of supplements. We’ll also provide examples of diversity essays and community essay examples. But first, let’s discuss exactly what a cultural diversity essay is. 

The purpose of the cultural diversity essay in college applications is to show the admissions committee what makes you unique. The cultural diversity essay also lets you describe what type of “ diversity ” you would bring to campus.

We’ll also highlight a diversity essay sample for three college applications. These include the Georgetown application essay , Rice application essay , and Williams application essay . We’ll provide examples of diversity essays for each college. Then, for each of these college essays that worked, we will analyze their strengths to help you craft your own essays. 

Finally, we’ll give you some tips on how to write a cultural diversity essay that will make your applications shine. 

But first, let’s explore the types of college essays you might encounter on your college applications. 

Types of College Essays

College application requirements will differ among schools. However, you’ll submit one piece of writing to nearly every school on your list—the personal statement . A strong personal statement can help you stand out in the admissions process. 

So, how do you know what to write about? That depends on the type of college essay included in your college application requirements. 

There are a few main types of college essays that you might encounter in the college admissions process. Theese include the “Why School ” essay, the “Why Major ” essay, and the extracurricular activity essay. This also includes the type of essay we will focus on in this guide—the cultural diversity essay. 

“Why School” essay

The “Why School ” essay is exactly what it sounds like. For this type of college essay, you’ll need to underscore why you want to go to this particular school. 

However, don’t make the mistake of just listing off what you like about the school. Additionally, don’t just reiterate information you can find on their admissions website. Instead, you’ll want to make connections between what the school offers and how you are a great fit for that college community. 

“Why Major” essay

The idea behind the “Why Major ” essay is similar to that of the “Why School ” essay above. However, instead of writing about the school at large, this essay should highlight why you plan to study your chosen major.

There are plenty of directions you could take with this type of essay. For instance, you might describe how you chose this major, what career you plan to pursue upon graduation, or other details.

Extracurricular Activity essay

The extracurricular activity essay asks you to elaborate on one of the activities that you participated in outside of the classroom. 

For this type of college essay, you’ll need to select an extracurricular activity that you pursued while you were in high school. Bonus points if you can tie your extracurricular activity into your future major, career goals, or other extracurricular activities for college. Overall, your extracurricular activity essay should go beyond your activities list. In doing so, it should highlight why your chosen activity matters to you.

Cultural Diversity essay

The cultural diversity essay is your chance to expound upon diversity in all its forms. Before you write your cultural diversity essay, you should ask yourself some key questions. These questions can include: How will you bring diversity to your future college campus? What unique perspective do you bring to the table? 

Another sub-category of the cultural diversity essay is the gender diversity essay. As its name suggests, this essay would center around the author’s gender. This essay would highlight how gender shapes the way the writer understands the world around them. 

Later, we’ll look at examples of diversity essays and other college essays that worked. But before we do, let’s figure out how to identify a cultural diversity essay in the first place. 

How to identify a ‘cultural diversity’ essay

So, you’re wondering how you’ll be able to identify a cultural diversity essay as you review your college application requirements. 

Aside from the major giveaway of having the word “diversity” in the prompt, a cultural diversity essay will ask you to describe what makes you different from other applicants. In other words, what aspects of your unique culture(s) have influenced your perspective and shaped you into who you are today?

Diversity can refer to race, ethnicity, first-generation status, gender, or anything in between. You can write about a myriad of things in a cultural diversity essay. For instance, you might discuss your personal background, identity, values, experiences, or how you’ve overcome challenges in your life. 

However, don’t feel limited in what you can address in a cultural diversity essay. The words “culture” and “diversity” mean different things to different people. Above all, you’ll want your diversity essays for college to be personal and sincere. 

How is a ‘community’ essay different? 

A community essay can also be considered a cultural diversity essay. In fact, you can think of the community essay as a subcategory of the cultural diversity essay. However, there is a key difference between a community essay and a cultural diversity essay, which we will illustrate below. 

You might have already seen some community essay examples while you were researching college application requirements. But how exactly is a community essay different from a cultural diversity essay?

One way to tell the difference between community essay examples and cultural diversity essay examples is by the prompt. A community essay will highlight, well, community . This means it will focus on how your identity will shape your interactions on campus—not just how it informs your own experiences.

Two common forms to look out for

Community essay examples can take two forms. First, you’ll find community essay examples about your past experiences. These let you show the admissions team how you have positively influenced your own community. 

Other community essay examples, however, will focus on the future. These community essay examples will ask you to detail how you will contribute to your future college community. We refer to these as college community essay examples.

In college community essay examples, you’ll see applicants detail how they might interact with their fellow students. These essays may also discuss how students plan to positively contribute to the campus community. 

As we mentioned above, the community essay, along with community essay examples and college community essay examples, fit into the larger category of the cultural diversity essay. Although we do not have specific community essay examples or college community essay examples in this guide, we will continue to highlight the subtle differences between the two. 

Before we continue the discussion of community essay examples and college community essay examples, let’s start with some examples of cultural diversity essay prompts. For each of the cultural diversity essay prompts, we’ll name the institutions that include these diversity essays for college as part of their college application requirements. 

What are some examples of ‘cultural diversity’ essays? 

Now, you have a better understanding of the similarities and differences between the cultural diversity essay and the community essay. So, next, let’s look at some examples of cultural diversity essay prompts.

The prompts below are from the Georgetown application, Rice application, and Williams application, respectively. As we discuss the similarities and differences between prompts, remember the framework we provided above for what constitutes a cultural diversity essay and a community essay. 

Later in this guide, we’ll provide real examples of diversity essays, including Georgetown essay examples, Rice University essay examples, and Williams supplemental essays examples. These are all considered college essays that worked—meaning that the author was accepted into that particular institution. 

Georgetown Supplementals Essays

Later, we’ll look at Georgetown supplemental essay examples. Diversity essays for Georgetown are a product of this prompt: 

As Georgetown is a diverse community, the Admissions Committee would like to know more about you in your own words. Please submit a brief essay, either personal or creative, which you feel best describes you. 

You might have noticed two keywords in this prompt right away: “diverse” and “community.” These buzzwords indicate that this prompt is a cultural diversity essay. You could even argue that responses to this prompt would result in college community essay examples. After all, the prompt refers to the Georgetown community. 

For this prompt, you’ll want to produce a diversity essay sample that highlights who you are. In order to do that successfully, you’ll need to self-reflect before putting pen to paper. What aspects of your background, personality, or values best describe who you are? How might your presence at Georgetown influence or contribute to their diverse community? 

Additionally, this cultural diversity essay can be personal or creative. So, you have more flexibility with the Georgetown supplemental essays than with other similar diversity essay prompts. Depending on the direction you go, your response to this prompt could be considered a cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or a college community essay. 

Rice University Essays

The current Rice acceptance rate is just 9% , making it a highly selective school. Because the Rice acceptance rate is so low, your personal statement and supplemental essays can make a huge difference. 

The Rice University essay examples we’ll provide below are based on this prompt: 

The quality of Rice’s academic life and the Residential College System are heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural traditions each student brings. What personal perspective would you contribute to life at Rice? 

Breaking down the prompt.

Like the prompt above, this cultural diversity essay asks about your “life experiences,” “cultural traditions,” and personal “perspectives.” These phrases indicate a cultural diversity essay. Keep in mind this may not be the exact prompt you’ll have to answer in your own Rice application. However, future Rice prompts will likely follow a similar framework as this diversity essay sample.

Although this prompt is not as flexible as the Georgetown prompt, it does let you discuss aspects of Rice’s academic life and Residential College System that appeal to you. You can also highlight how your experiences have influenced your personal perspective. 

The prompt also asks about how you would contribute to life at Rice. So, your response could also fall in line with college community essay examples. Remember, college community essay examples are another sub-category of community essay examples. Successful college community essay examples will illustrate the ways in which students would contribute to their future campus community. 

Williams Supplemental Essays

Like the Rice acceptance rate, the Williams acceptance rate is also 9% . Because the Williams acceptance rate is so low, you’ll want to pay close attention to the Williams supplemental essays examples as you begin the writing process. 

The Williams supplemental essays examples below are based on this prompt: 

Every first-year student at Williams lives in an Entry – a thoughtfully constructed microcosm of the student community that’s a defining part of the Williams experience. From the moment they arrive, students find themselves in what’s likely the most diverse collection of backgrounds, perspectives, and interests they’ve ever encountered. What might differentiate you from the 19 other first-year students in an Entry? What perspective would you add to the conversation with your peer(s)?

Reflecting on the prompt.

Immediately, words like “diverse,” “backgrounds,” “perspectives,” “interests,” and “differentiate” should stand out to you. These keywords highlight the fact that this is a cultural diversity essay. Similar to the Rice essay, this may not be the exact prompt you’ll face on your Williams application. However, we can still learn from it.

Like the Georgetown essay, this prompt requires you to put in some self-reflection before you start writing. What aspects of your background differentiate you from other people? How would these differences impact your interactions with peers? 

This prompt also touches on the “student community” and how you would “add to the conversation with your peer(s).” By extension, any strong responses to this prompt could also be considered as college community essay examples. 

Community Essays

All of the prompts above mention campus community. So, you could argue that they are also examples of community essays. 

Like we mentioned above, you can think of community essays as a subcategory of the cultural diversity essay. If the prompt alludes to the campus community, or if your response is centered on how you would interact within that community, your essay likely falls into the world of college community essay examples. 

Regardless of what you would classify the essay as, all successful essays will be thoughtful, personal, and rich with details. We’ll show you examples of this in our “college essays that worked” section below. 

Which schools require a cultural diversity or community essay? 

Besides Georgetown, Rice, and Williams, many other college applications require a cultural diversity essay or community essay. In fact, from the Ivy League to HBCUs and state schools, the cultural diversity essay is a staple across college applications. 

Although we will not provide a diversity essay sample for each of the colleges below, it is helpful to read the prompts. This will build your familiarity with other college applications that require a cultural diversity essay or community essay. Some schools that require a cultural diversity essay or community essay include New York University , Duke University , Harvard University , Johns Hopkins University , and University of Michigan . 

New York University

NYU listed a cultural diversity essay as part of its 2022-2023 college application requirements. Here is the prompt:

NYU was founded on the belief that a student’s identity should not dictate the ability for them to access higher education. That sense of opportunity for all students, of all backgrounds, remains a part of who we are today and a critical part of what makes us a world class university. Our community embraces diversity, in all its forms, as a cornerstone of the NYU experience. We would like to better understand how your experiences would help us to shape and grow our diverse community.

Duke university.

Duke is well-known for its community essay: 

What is your sense of Duke as a university and a community, and why do you consider it a good match for you? If there’s something in particular about our offerings that attracts you, feel free to share that as well.

A top-ranked Ivy League institution, Harvard University also has a cultural diversity essay as part of its college application requirements: 

Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development, or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.

Johns hopkins university.

The Johns Hopkins supplement is another example of a cultural diversity essay: 

Founded in the spirit of exploration and discovery, Johns Hopkins University encourages students to share their perspectives, develop their interests, and pursue new experiences. Use this space to share something you’d like the admissions committee to know about you (your interests, your background, your identity, or your community), and how it has shaped what you want to get out of your college experience at Hopkins. 

University of michigan.

The University of Michigan requires a community essay for its application: 

Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong and describe that community and your place within it. 

Community essay examples.

The Duke and Michigan prompts are perfect illustrations of community essay examples. However, they have some critical differences. So, if you apply to both of these schools, you’ll have to change the way you approach either of these community essays. 

The Duke prompt asks you to highlight why you are a good match for the Duke community. You’ll also see this prompt in other community essay examples. To write a successful response to this prompt, you’ll need to reference offerings specific to Duke (or whichever college requires this essay). In order to know what to reference, you’ll need to do your research before you start writing. 

Consider the following questions as you write your diversity essay sample if the prompt is similar to Duke University’s

• What values does this college community have? 
• How do these tie in with what you value? 
• Is there something that this college offers that matches your interests, personality, or background?  

On the other hand, the Michigan essay prompt asks you to describe a community that you belong to as well as your place within that community. This is another variation of the prompt for community essay examples. 

To write a successful response to this prompt, you’ll need to identify a community that you belong to. Then, you’ll need to think critically about how you interact with that community. 

Below are some questions to consider as you write your diversity essay sample for colleges like Michigan: 

• Out of all the communities you belong to, which can you highlight in your response? 
• How have you impacted this community? 
• How has this community impacted you?

Now, in the next few sections, we’ll dive into the Georgetown supplemental essay examples, the Rice university essay examples, and the Williams supplemental essays examples. After each diversity essay sample, we’ll include a breakdown of why these are considered college essays that worked. 

Georgetown Essay Examples

As a reminder, the Georgetown essay examples respond to this prompt: 

As Georgetown is a diverse community, the Admissions Committee would like to know more about you in your own words. Please submit a brief essay, either personal or creative, which you feel best describes you.

Here is the excerpt of the diversity essay sample from our Georgetown essay examples: 

Georgetown University Essay Example

The best thing I ever did was skip eight days of school in a row. Despite the protests of teachers over missed class time, I told them that the world is my classroom. The lessons I remember most are those that took place during my annual family vacation to coastal Maine. That rural world is the most authentic and incredible classroom where learning simply happens and becomes exponential. 

Years ago, as I hunted through the rocks and seaweed for seaglass and mussels, I befriended a Maine local hauling her battered kayak on the shore. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I had found a kindred spirit in Jeanne. Jeanne is a year-round resident who is more than the hard working, rugged Mainer that meets the eye; reserved and humble in nature, she is a wealth of knowledge and is self-taught through necessity. With thoughtful attention to detail, I engineered a primitive ramp made of driftwood and a pulley system to haul her kayak up the cliff. We diligently figured out complex problems and developed solutions through trial and error.

After running out of conventional materials, I recycled and reimagined items that had washed ashore. We expected to succeed, but were not afraid to fail. Working with Jeanne has been the best classroom in the world; without textbooks or technology, she has made a difference in my life. Whether building a basic irrigation system for her organic garden or installing solar panels to harness the sun’s energy, every project has shown me the value of taking action and making an impact. Each year brings a different project with new excitement and unique challenges. My resourcefulness, problem solving ability, and innovative thinking have advanced under her tutelage. 

While exploring the rocky coast of Maine, I embrace every experience as an unparalleled educational opportunity that transcends any classroom environment. I discovered that firsthand experience and real-world application of science are my best teachers. In school, applications of complex calculations and abstract theories are sometimes obscured by grades and structure. In Maine, I expand my love of science and renourish my curious spirit. I am a highly independent, frugal, resilient Mainer living as a southern girl in NC. 

Why this essay worked

This is one of the Georgetown supplemental essay examples that works, and here’s why. The author starts the essay with an interesting hook, which makes the reader want to learn more about this person and their perspective. 

Throughout the essay, the author illustrates their intellectual curiosity. From befriending Jeanne and creating a pulley system to engineering other projects on the rocky coast of Maine, the author demonstrates how they welcome challenges and work to solve problems. 

Further, the author mentions values that matter to them—taking action and making an impact. Both facets are also part of Georgetown’s core values . By making these connections in their essay, the author shows the admissions committee exactly how they would be a great fit for the Georgetown community. 

Finally, the author uses their experience in Maine to showcase their love of science, which is likely the field they will study at Georgetown. Like this writer, you should try to include most important parts of your identity into your essay. This includes things like life experiences, passions, majors, extracurricular activities for college, and more. 

Rice University Essay Examples

The Rice University essay examples are from this prompt: 

The quality of Rice’s academic life and the Residential College System are heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural traditions each student brings. What personal perspective would you contribute to life at Rice? (500-word limit)

Rice university essay example.

Like every applicant, I also have a story to share. A story that makes me who I am and consists of chapters about my life experiences and adventures. Having been born in a different country, my journey to America was one of the most difficult things I had ever experienced. Everything felt different. The atmosphere, the places, the food, and especially the people. Everywhere I looked, I saw something new. Although it was a bit overwhelming, one thing had not changed.

The caring nature of the people was still prevalent in everyday interactions. I was overwhelmed by how supportive and understanding people were of one another. Whether it is race, religion, or culture, everyone was accepted and appreciated. I knew that I could be whoever I wanted to be and that the only limitation was my imagination. Through hard work and persistence I put my all in everything that I did. I get this work ethic from my father since he is living proof that anything can be accomplished with continued determination. Listening to the childhood stories he told me, my dad would reminisce about how he was born in an impoverished area in a third world country during a turbulent and unpredictable time.

Even with a passion for learning, he had to work a laborious job in an attempt to help his parents make ends meet. He talked about how he would study under the street lights when the power went out at home. His parents wanted something better for him, as did he. Not living in America changed nothing about their work ethic. His parents continued to work hard daily, in an attempt to provide for their son. My dad worked and studied countless hours, paying his way through school with jobs and scholarships. His efforts paid off when he finally moved to America and opened his own business. None of it would have been possible without tremendous effort and dedication needed for a better life, values that are instilled within me as well, and this is the perspective that I wish to bring to Rice. 

This diversity essay sample references the author’s unique life experiences and personal perspective, which makes it one example of college essays that worked. The author begins the essay by alluding to their unique story—they were born in a different country and then came to America. Instead of facing this change as a challenge, the author shows how this new experience helped them to feel comfortable with all kinds of people. They also highlight how their diversity was accepted and appreciated. 

Additionally, the author incorporates information about their father’s story, which helps to frame their own values and where those values came from. The values that they chose to highlight also fall in line with the values of the Rice community. 

Williams Supplemental Essay Examples

Let’s read the prompt that inspired so many strong Williams supplemental essays examples again: 

Every first-year student at Williams lives in an Entry—a thoughtfully constructed microcosm of the student community that’s a defining part of the Williams experience. From the moment they arrive, students find themselves in what’s likely the most diverse collection of backgrounds, perspectives and interests they’ve ever encountered. What might differentiate you from the 19 other first-year students in an entry? What perspective(s) would you add to the conversation with your peers?

Williams college essay example.

Through the flow in my head

See you clad in red

But not just the clothes

It’s your whole being

Covering in this sickening blanket

Of heat and pain

Are you in agony, I wonder?

Is this the hell they told me about?

Have we been condemned?

Reduced to nothing but pain

At least we have each other

In our envelopes of crimson

I try in vain

“Take my hands” I shriek

“Let’s protect each other, 

You and me, through this hell”

My body contorts

And deforms into nothingness

You remain the same

Clad in red

With faraway eyes

You, like a statue

Your eyes fixed somewhere else

You never see me

Just the red briefcase in your heart

We aren’t together

It’s always been me alone

While you stand there, aloof, with the briefcase in your heart.

I wrote this poem the day my prayer request for the Uighur Muslims got denied at school. At the time, I was stunned. I was taught to have empathy for those around me. Yet, that empathy disappears when told to extend it to someone different. I can’t comprehend this contradiction and I refuse to. 

At Williams, I hope to become a Community Engagement Fellow at the Davis Center. I hope to use Williams’ support for social justice and advocacy to educate my fellow classmates on social issues around the world. Williams students are not just scholars but also leaders and changemakers. Together, we can strive to better the world through advocacy.

Human’s capability for love is endless. We just need to open our hearts to everyone. 

It’s time to let the briefcase go and look at those around us with our real human eyes.

We see you now. Please forgive us.

As we mentioned above, the Williams acceptance rate is incredibly low. This makes the supplemental essay that much more important. 

This diversity essay sample works because it is personal and memorable. The author chooses to start the essay off with a poem. Which, if done right, will immediately grab the reader’s attention. 

Further, the author contextualizes the poem by explaining the circumstances surrounding it—they wrote it in response to a prayer request that was denied at school. In doing so, they also highlight their own values of empathy and embracing diversity. 

Finally, the author ends their cultural diversity essay by describing what excites them about Williams. They also discuss how they see themselves interacting within the Williams community. This is a key piece of the essay, as it helps the reader understand how the author would be a good fit for Williams. 

The examples provided within this essay also touch on issues that are important to the author, which provides a glimpse into the type of student the author would be on campus. Additionally, this response shows what potential extracurricular activities for college the author might be interested in pursuing while at Williams. 

How to Write a Cultural Diversity Essay

You want your diversity essay to stand out from any other diversity essay sample. But how do you write a successful cultural diversity essay? 

First, consider what pieces of your identity you want to highlight in your essay. Of course, race and ethnicity are important facets of diversity. However, there are plenty of other factors to consider. 

As you brainstorm, think outside the box to figure out what aspects of your identity help make up who you are. Because identity and diversity fall on a spectrum, there is no right or wrong answer here. 

Fit your ideas to the specific school

Once you’ve decided on what you want to represent in your cultural diversity essay, think about how that fits into the college of your choice. Use your cultural diversity essay to make connections to the school. If your college has specific values or programs that align with your identity, then include them in your cultural diversity essay! 

Above all, you should write about something that is important to you. Your cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or community essay will succeed if you are passionate about your topic and willing to get personal. 

Additional Tips for Community & Cultural Diversity Essays

1. start early.

In order to create the strongest diversity essay possible, you’ll want to start early. Filling out college applications is already a time-consuming process. So, you can cut back on additional stress and anxiety by writing your cultural diversity essay as early as possible. 

2. Brainstorm

Writing a cultural diversity essay or community essay is a personal process. To set yourself up for success, take time to brainstorm and reflect on your topic. Overall, you want your cultural diversity essay to be a good indication of who you are and what makes you a unique applicant. 

3. Proofread

We can’t stress this final tip enough. Be sure to proofread your cultural diversity essay before you hit the submit button. Additionally, you can read your essay aloud to hear how it flows. You can also can ask someone you trust, like your college advisor or a teacher, to help proofread your essay as well.

Other CollegeAdvisor Essay Resources to Explore

Looking for additional resources on supplemental essays for the colleges we mentioned above? Do you need help with incorporating extracurricular activities for college into your essays or crafting a strong diversity essay sample? We’ve got you covered. 

Our how to get into Georgetown guide covers additional tips on how to approach the supplemental diversity essay. If you’re wondering how to write about community in your essay, check out our campus community article for an insider’s perspective on Williams College.

Want to learn strategies for writing compelling cultural diversity essays? Check out this Q&A webinar, featuring a former Georgetown admissions officer. And, if you’re still unsure of what to highlight in your community essay, try getting inspiration from a virtual college tour . 

Cultural Diversity Essay & Community Essay Examples – Final Thoughts

Your supplemental essays are an important piece of the college application puzzle. With colleges becoming more competitive than ever, you’ll want to do everything you can to create a strong candidate profile. This includes writing well-crafted responses for a cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or community essay. 

We hope our cultural diversity essay guide helped you learn more about this common type of supplemental essay. As you are writing your own cultural diversity essay or community essay, use the essay examples from Georgetown, Rice, and Williams above as your guide. 

Getting into top schools takes a lot more than a strong resume. Writing specific, thoughtful, and personal responses for a cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or community essay will put you one step closer to maximizing your chances of admission. Good luck!

CollegeAdvisor.com is here to help you with every aspect of the college admissions process. From taking a gap year to completing enrollment , we’re here to help. Register today to receive one-on-one support from an admissions expert as you begin your college application journey.

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The number of multicultural cities is increasing due to globalisation. Does this development have more advantages or disadvantages?

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Fully explain your ideas

To get an excellent score in the IELTS Task 2 writing section, one of the easiest and most effective tips is structuring your writing in the most solid format. A great argument essay structure may be divided to four paragraphs, in which comprises of four sentences (excluding the conclusion paragraph, which comprises of three sentences).

For we to consider an essay structure a great one, it should be looking like this:

• Paragraph 1 - Introduction
• Sentence 1 - Background statement
• Sentence 2 - Detailed background statement
• Sentence 3 - Thesis
• Sentence 4 - Outline sentence
• Paragraph 2 - First supporting paragraph
• Sentence 1 - Topic sentence
• Sentence 2 - Example
• Sentence 3 - Discussion
• Sentence 4 - Conclusion
• Paragraph 3 - Second supporting paragraph
• Paragraph 4 - Conclusion
• Sentence 1 - Summary
• Sentence 2 - Restatement of thesis
• Sentence 3 - Prediction or recommendation

Our recommended essay structure above comprises of fifteen (15) sentences, which will make your essay approximately 250 to 275 words.

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Working from home, some think as beneficial some people think it may distract the family routine. Discuss both views and what is your opinion?

In many countries, more and more people choose to buy imported food raher than food produced locally. why do people buy imported food what could be done to encourage people to buy local food., some people believe that modern technology, such as the internet and smartphones,creates more problems than it solves. to what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion, university education system is one of the most widely discussed topics these days. many people believe that college students should be allowed to choose subjects they like to study. others think that it is always better to learn subjects that have relevance in the future and i agree with them. both views will be discussed in this essay, in the developed world, average life expectancy is increasing. what problems will this cause for individuals and society suggest some measures that could be taken to reduce the impact of aging populations..

What Is Multiculturalism? Definition, Theories, and Examples

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In sociology, multiculturalism describes how a given society deals with cultural diversity. Multiculturalism assumes members of different cultures can coexist peacefully and society is enriched by preserving, respecting, and encouraging cultural diversity. In the area of political philosophy , multiculturalism refers to ways societies formulate and implement official policies dealing with the equitable treatment of different cultures.

Multiculturalism Key Takeaways

• Multiculturalism is how a society deals with cultural diversity at national and community levels. 
• Sociologically, multiculturalism assumes that society benefits from increased diversity through the harmonious coexistence of different cultures.
• Multiculturalism typically develops according to one of two theories: the “melting pot” or the “salad bowl.”

Multiculturalism can take place on a nationwide scale or within a nation’s communities. It may occur naturally through immigration or artificially when jurisdictions of different cultures are combined through legislative decree, as in the case of French and English Canada.

Proponents of multiculturalism believe that people should retain at least some features of their traditional cultures . Opponents say that multiculturalism threatens the social order by diminishing the identity and influence of the predominant culture. While acknowledging that it is a sociopolitical issue, this article will focus on the sociological aspects of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism Theories

The two primary theories or models of multiculturalism as how different cultures are integrated into a single society are best defined by the metaphors commonly used to describe them—the “melting pot” and the “salad bowl” theories.

The Melting Pot Theory

The melting pot theory of multiculturalism assumes that various immigrant groups will tend to “melt together,” abandoning their cultures and eventually becoming fully assimilated into the predominant society. Typically used to describe the assimilation of immigrants into the United States , the melting pot theory is often illustrated by the metaphor of a foundry’s smelting pots in which the elements iron and carbon are melted together to create a single, stronger metal: steel . In 1782, French-American immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote that in America, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

The melting pot model has been criticized for reducing diversity, causing people to lose their traditions, and having to be enforced through governmental policy. For example, the U.S. Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 forced the assimilation of nearly 350,000 Indigenous peoples into American society without any regard for the diversity of their heritages and lifestyles.

The Salad Bowl Theory

A more liberal theory of multiculturalism than the melting pot, the salad bowl theory describes a heterogeneous society in which people coexist but retain at least some of the unique characteristics of their traditional culture. Like a salad’s ingredients, different cultures are brought together, but rather than coalescing into a single homogeneous culture, retain their distinct flavors. In the United States, New York City , with its many unique ethnic communities like “Little India,” “Little Odessa,” and “Chinatown” is considered an example of a salad bowl society.

The salad bowl theory asserts people don't have to give up their cultural heritage to be considered members of the dominant society. For example, African Americans do not need to stop observing Kwanzaa rather than Christmas to be considered Americans.

On the negative side, the cultural differences encouraged by the salad bowl model can divide a society resulting in prejudice and discrimination . In addition, critics point to a 2007 study by American political scientist Robert Putnam showed people living in salad bowl multicultural communities were less likely to vote or volunteer for community improvement projects.

Characteristics of a Multicultural Society

Multicultural societies are characterized by people of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities living together in the same community. In multicultural communities, people retain, pass down, celebrate, and share their unique cultural ways of life, languages, art, traditions, and behaviors.

The characteristics of multiculturalism often spread into the community’s public schools, where curricula are crafted to introduce young people to the qualities and benefits of cultural diversity. Though sometimes criticized as a form of “political correctness,” educational systems in multicultural societies stress the histories and traditions of minorities in classrooms and textbooks. A 2018 study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that the “post-Millennial” generation of people ages 6 to 21 is the most diverse generation in American society.

Far from an exclusively American phenomenon, examples of multiculturalism are found worldwide. In Argentina , for example, newspaper articles, and radio and television programs are commonly presented in English, German, Italian, French, or Portuguese, as well as the country’s native Spanish. Indeed, Argentina’s constitution promotes immigration by recognizing the right of individuals to retain multiple citizenships from other countries.

As a key element of the country’s society, Canada adopted multiculturalism as an official policy during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, the Canadian constitution, along with laws such as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act and the Broadcasting Act of 1991, recognize the importance of multicultural diversity. According to the Canadian Library and Archives, more than 200,000 people—representing at least 26 different ethnocultural groups—immigrate to Canada every year.

Why Diversity Is Important

Multiculturalism is the key to achieving a high degree of cultural diversity. Diversity occurs when people of different races, nationalities, religions, ethnicities, and philosophies come together to form a community. A truly diverse society recognizes and values the cultural differences in its people.

Proponents of cultural diversity argue it makes humanity stronger and may be vital to its long-term survival. In 2001, the General Conference of UNESCO took this position when it asserted in its Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity that “...cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature.”

Today, entire countries, workplaces, and schools are increasingly made up of various cultural, racial, and ethnic groups. By recognizing and learning about these groups, communities build trust, respect, and understanding across all cultures.

Communities and organizations in all settings benefit from the different backgrounds, skills, experiences, and new ways of thinking that come with cultural diversity.

Sources and Further Reference  

• St. John de Crevecoeur, J. Hector (1782). Letters from an American Farmer: What is an America? The Avalon Project. Yale University.   
• De La Torre, Miguel A. The Problem With the Melting Pot . EthicsDaily.com (2009).  
• Hauptman, Laurence M. Going Off the Reservation: A Memoir . University of California Press. 
• Jonas, Michael. The downside of diversity . The Boston Globe (August 5, 2007).  
• Fry, Richard and Parker Kim. Benchmarks Show 'Post-Millenials" on Track to Be Most Diverse, Best-Educated Generation Yet . Pew Research Center (November 2018). 
• What Is the Resource Mobilization Theory?
• Overview of Sociobiology Theory
• What Is Transnationalism? Definition, Pros, and Cons
• What Is Convergence Theory?
• Understanding Diffusion in Sociology
• How Our Aligning Behavior Shapes Everyday Life
• Definition of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Sociology
• Assessing a Situation, in Terms of Sociology
• What Is Social Learning Theory?
• What Is Groupthink? Definition and Examples
• What Is a Microaggression? Everyday Insults With Harmful Effects
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• What Is Social Class, and Why Does it Matter?
• What Is Role Strain? Definition and Examples
• What Is a Cohort Effect? Definition and Examples
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Hundreds of places in the US said racism was a public health crisis. What's changed?

More than 200 cities and counties declared racism was a public health crisis in the past few years, mostly after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis in May 2020

More than 200 cities and counties declared racism was a public health crisis in the past few years, mostly after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis in May 2020. Racial justice advocates said they finally felt heard by the quick swell of political will to address disparities like disproportionate COVID-19 deaths or infant and maternal mortality rates .

The declarations “signified this might be us finally breaking through the noise that they haven’t been willing to hear,” said Ryan McClinton, who works at the nonprofit Public Health Advocates in Sacramento County, California. Marsha Guthrie, the senior director at the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, called 2020 a "catalytic moment for us to kind of reimagine social consciousness.”

“Think about the ... decades (and) decades of just fighting to get the conversation about race even centered in the American psyche," she said. “Now people talk about it as a general course of fact.”

Some places' health departments took on the work of the declarations, creating improvement plans centered on racial equity . Others turned the work over to task forces and consultants to look at internal work environments or make action plans and recommendations.

Years after the declarations, community organizers and public health advocates in Milwaukee and Sacramento County say not much has changed. Officials counter that it’ll take more than a few years to undo centuries of structural and institutional racism.

But experts, officials and advocates all agreed on one thing: The declarations were an important first step toward creating a racially equitable society. Extensive research shows racism can have detrimental health impacts on people of color, including chronic stress and anxiety and higher rates of heart disease and asthma.

“If we’re not going to name racism in the first place, then we’re not going to start to develop solutions to address it,” said Dara Mendez, who teaches epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh and studied the early declarations. “... Then the next step is (asking) what are the actions behind it? ... Are there resources? Is there community action?"

Lilliann Paine wanted to see everyday public health work focus on the intersection of racism and public health, and in 2018 brought the idea to the Wisconsin Public Health Association. Milwaukee, where Black people are the largest minority group, became one of the first cities in the country to adopt a declaration in 2019.

“If racism as a public health crisis was truly operationalized, we would have more people graduating from high school. If it was truly operationalized, people could live to their full potential and not worry about being mistaken by a police officer for having a gun,” said Paine, who was the chief of staff at the city's health department from late 2019 to March 2021. “And those aren’t changes you can speak to overnight.”

Wisconsin's biggest city now has a community health improvement plan , released in December, that wants to address racism as a public health crisis in various ways — from increasing voter registration to improving infant mortality rates, which are three times higher among Black infants than white infants.

The plan also highlights the need to improve housing conditions, and one of the health department's key priorities is addressing lead poisoning in older homes. Black children in Milwaukee are up to 2.7 times more likely to have elevated blood lead levels compared to other races, according to the community health improvement plan.

“When the built environment is essentially a poison in your families, you’re going to see health outcomes that affect that,” health department commissioner Dr. Michael Totoraitis said, giving an example that kids might be "deemed problematic at school because they were lead-poisoned and have permanent brain damage.”

Deanna Branch’s 11-year old son, Aidan, got lead poisoning when he was a toddler. She pointed to the dilapidated housing that she and many Black Milwaukee residents have to live in.

“We have to work with what we have and do what we have to do to keep that place safe for our kids," Branch said, adding, "rent is getting higher, but the upkeep of apartments isn’t changing at all.”

Longtime racial equity advocate Melody McCurtis said she's interested in some parts of the plan — but is largely still skeptical.

“When it comes down to tackling racism, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to hear the word ‘explore,’” said McCurtis, who is deputy director of Metcalfe Park Community Bridges, a resident-led community group. “I know you have to explore things, but some of these things, there’s been plenty of research done already … What is the real strategy that’s really going to get folks where we need to be?”

Putting money toward racism-as-a-public-health-crisis declarations is an important way for governments to show they're committed to implementing the steps, Mendez said. But money was a rarity in her review of 125 declarations that had been adopted by the end of September 2020.

“It actually is also going to take some financial will and some real investments to create the types of layered strategies that can move the needle on well-being outcomes,” said Guthrie with the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, which works with governments on racial equity in about 20 states. “That doesn’t happen overnight.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered millions of dollars in federal grants in 2022 for state and local health departments to address racial disparities and develop the workforce.

Sacramento County, California, received $7 million and has used it to to pay various consultants to create an action plan for its health department and to train the staff on implicit bias and racial equity.

The county, which passed its declaration in November 2020, has significant Latino, Asian and Black populations, each with varying health disparities . Black infants in Sacramento County had a death rate twice as high as the overall infant death rate in 2020. And between 2010 and 2020, Black, Asian and Hispanic women were all more likely to die during childbirth than white women.

The declaration gave the health department a “green light” to begin addressing equity at the root, county public health officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye said. That included creating a fellowship program for college students by 2029 to create a pathway to employment.

Community organizers from Public Health Advocates praise the health department for starting up a health and racial equity unit. But they are frustrated by the lack of outward-facing progress.

A year ago, the organization confronted the county board of supervisors during a meeting over concerns that the county was too focused on internal diversity, equity and inclusion as opposed to racial justice. They were frustrated that the county spent $190,000 on an out-of-state consultant and didn't put community members on the DEI cabinet — which was established in May 2023, three years after the declaration.

The county also lagged in hiring a DEI chief to oversee the action plan. The Civil Service Commission, which runs the process for choosing and retaining county employees, initially didn't approve the job description because the commission was concerned it would be redundant.

Cephoni Jackson eventually was hired in January. She shared a draft of the yet-to-be-finalized plan, which outlines goals of creating a “culture of belonging," building more inclusive leadership, and coming up with strategies to retain and develop talent. She wants to establish a committee made up of community members by 2025.

The goals don’t have a timeline, and various county leaders are tasked with “championing” each step. Jackson said she’s seeing high energy from employees to begin implementing the action plan, adding: “It’s like the conditions are right for the culture to shift.”

It's progress that's “more than the bread crumbs they've given us," said Kula Koenig, the chief program officer at Public Health Advocates.

And Phil Serna, the county board member who brought forth the declaration, said it's important to recognize what has been done — and what still lies ahead.

“I think in many respects dealing with racism, addressing racism responsibly, is kind of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, right?” he said. “As soon as you think you’re done, you’re not. You have to go back and start painting again.”

This story is part of an AP ongoing series exploring the impact, legacy and ripple effects of what is widely called the Ferguson uprising , which was sparked a decade ago by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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