I’ve been near and in water for as long as I can remember. I learned how to swim when I was age 4– my teenaged aunts took me to a local creek, put me in the water and taught me dog paddling, lying on my back and front, and how to hold my breath underwater. By age 6, I was able to swim in the deep end of the pool by myself with some confidence. My niece and nephews followed the same pattern: early swim exposure and lessons, and lots of trips to the pool and ocean. All my family are comfortable swimmers.

But not everyone is. In this article in the Economist, we read a short history of the race, class and income gaps that divide swimmers from non-swimmers. Here’s a graph they created from data gathered from the Centers for Disease Control (in 2023, the good ol’ days for the institution…)

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, black children aged five to 14 are more than five times as likely to drown in a swimming pool as their white counterparts. Black adults are more than five times as likely as whites to report that they cannot swim. 

Many colleges and universities used to have swim tests as a graduation requirement, but that has been in decline in the past decades. The most recent Ivy League school to drop the swim test is Dartmouth College. This spring will be the first year their graduating class will not consist entirely of people who either passed the swim test or passed a swim class. Why?

It’s complicated.

In addition to the cost and inconvenience if running a swim program for all students, the large racial gaps between swimmers and non-swimmers among college students make some college administrators uneasy. Here’s a quote from the article:

Williams College found that between 2013 and 2019, 81% of those who failed its 50-yard swim test were students of colour. After a university committee deemed this “problematic” in 2022 the faculty voted to scrap the requirement, citing its “disparate impact” on minority students. “You’re reinforcing systemic oppression in some ways,” the school’s athletic director told the Chronicle of Higher Education. When Dartmouth eliminated its own swim test later that year, school administrators offered a similar explanation, noting that those who failed were “overwhelmingly students of colour”.

At the same time, some colleges are leaning into the swim test as a way to “right historical wrongs”, in their view.

In 2024 a Cornell faculty committee voted to retain the university’s swim requirement. In its resolution the committee acknowledged racial disparities in swimming ability but argued that the test should remain precisely in order to help narrow them. “By providing formal swimming instruction”, the committee concluded, “Cornell is doing its small part to help right the wrongs of US history and close the racial gap in accidental drowning in this country.

MIT (my alma mater) has retained the swim test as well. Here’s what they have to say about it:

“We have a very intellectually bright population,” [MIT Director of Physical Education] Sampson Moore said. “Sometimes either they don’t have the time to do it as they’re growing up because they’re really focused on their studies, or they didn’t have access because they were an international student and it wasn’t as common.

“All of our students, I would bet my paycheck, are going to be leaders of something, right? Whether they’re a leader of their family or they’re leader of a department or a corporation, they can influence those around them,” she continued.

Is mandating a swim proficiency test imposing an undue burden on students who have been unduly burdened all their lives? Or is it a benefit, helping non-swimming students learn a valuable life skill?

I talked with a friend who is on Team NO-SWIM-TEST, citing how it can stigmatize and burden non-white students. I am on Team SWIM-TEST because, as a public health ethicist, I really want fewer US children, teenagers and adults to die from drowning.

And I admit, as a lifelong swimmer, I want everyone to have the chance to discover the joy of being a water creature, even temporarily.

But I see the complexity here.

If you find this topic interesting (as I certainly do), check out the book Contested Waters It’s a cultural and racial history of swimming pools in the US, documenting and analyzing the shifts from large numbers of public non-segregated bathing pools in urban areas to private, restricted recreational suburban pool clubs.

What do I wish we could do about this? Look to Australia– they have school-funded swimming and water-safety programs all over the country. However, even in Australia there isn’t full access to and implementation of swimming lessons for all school-age children. This is both a shame and a danger for people living in a country with 34,000 kilometers of coastline.

Readers, what do you think? Obvious, national funding for learn-to-swim programs for children would be a great solution. But in lieu of that, what about learning to swim in college? I’d love to hear from you.