Skip to main content

A 'demographic revolution' at Johns Hopkins

Excerpted from The Washington Post (Aug. 29, 2023):

Brian Robinson waded into a crowd of first-year classmates on the quad at Johns Hopkins University, squeezing in amid a jumble of baseball hats, hijabs, neon curls and tattered knit caps. He cheered with the others as a drone buzzed overhead to record their formation spelling out “JHU 27.”

The 18-year-old from Houston, with ambitions of becoming a scientist and neurosurgeon, had wondered whether he would fit in at the private research university in Baltimore. He came from an urban public school where nearly all the students, like him, are Black. His family had pushed him to go to college close to home.

But on this August day of orientation, Robinson had no doubts. “I was definitely wrong about the campus,” Robinson said. “People here don’t care about what you look like.”

Robinson is one of many students of color who, in swelling numbers, have transformed Hopkins over the past decade and made it one of the most racially diverse universities in the top tier of higher education.

Read the full story at The Washington Post