Q&A: Diversity

Since BYU is Church sponsored school, what is the diversity in the university? Is it that it is 99% LDS community?

Yes, BYU is a church sponsored school and is specifically run for and/or by the LDS community. However, there is sufficient diversity to have a correct mix of learnings from different cultures and thoughts along with a very high quality education. It is difficult to put it as a percentage as that would differ across the program. To give you an example, the MBA batch of 2008 has 21 international students from countries like South Korea, Japan, Bulgaria, India, Brazil, China, Kenya, Taiwan, Norway, Italy and Mongolia. So thats quite a lot of countries :-) .

To put it in percentage terms for the MBA program it would be close to 20%. Also, you should realise that most of the LDS members have served missions for 2 years (will specify the details about it later) in foreign countries and that makes them well versed with the culture and language. I call this intrinsic diversity, the same way we have in India. Although we belong to the same community, the so called Indian community we bring an intrinsic diversity in the form of our own cultures and traditions based on what part of India are we from.