More than half of the colleges in the Midwest have difficulty finding jobs for students because of race, religion or national origin. This was revealed in a seven-state survey of college placement offices in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
The study was conducted by the Midwest Educators Committee on Discrimination in Higher Education in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, preliminary to a conference of the Illinois Committee on Discriminations in Higher Education which meets here.
Re suits of a questionnaire replied to by 151 college and university placement offices showed that more than 50 percent of them have difficulty in placing minority group students. In only two states–Minnesota, with 35 percent and Wisconsin with 19 percent–did the proportion fall below one-half. Racial prejudice, the study revealed, is the greatest barrier. Religious bias was second, and discrimination on the basis of national origin, third.
There were slight variations from this pattern in the separate states surveyed, with Minnesota leading all other states in reporting religion as the greatest difficulty in placements, and Iowa reporting the qualification of “national origin” as the most prevalent.
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