Date: April 2, 1999
Copyright 1999, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Reprinted with permission.

In Bids to Increase Minority Enrollments, Colleges Deal With Reality and Perceptions

Rural campuses, state demographics, and reports of racial
incidents can all pose challenges

By Leo Reisberg

Having grown up in Boston, Tito Jackson experienced culture shock during his first week at the University of New Hampshire. When he saw only one other black face at an orientation event for 2,400 freshmen, he wanted to go home, he says.

A senior now, majoring in history, Mr. Jackson has adjusted to being the only black student in many of his classes. But some things still bother him -- such as when he is mistaken for an athlete, not just because of his size (6-foot-2, 240 pounds) but also because of the color of his skin.

"It's gotten to the point where people just ask, 'How was the game this weekend?' or 'What number are you?' not like, 'What's your major?'" he says.

He has found such stereotypes common at New Hampshire, where only 73 of the 10,000 undergraduates are black. Last November, Mr. Jackson and almost all of the other black students on the campus occupied the president's office for a day and left only after the administration promised to make the student population more diverse. University officials promised to bring the enrollment of black students up to 300 by 2004.

For administrators, now comes the task of figuring out just how to do that in a state where less than 1 per cent of the population is black.

Virtually all colleges are eager to improve racial diversity, and they compete fiercely to enroll well-prepared black students.
Notwithstanding recent court decisions limiting the use of race in admissions and in the awarding of financial aid in a handful of
states, many colleges around the country continue to award big scholarships to black students.

Money alone is often not enough to attract them.

Some black students are reluctant to enroll at predominantly white colleges in small towns, out of a fear of isolation. Some also shy away from colleges that have experienced racial unrest.

Many such institutions are looking for new ways to draw minority students to their campuses -- and to keep them there.

Some colleges are stepping up their presence in urban areas and bringing their own minority students along on recruiting trips. Others are scheduling campus recruitment events exclusively for black students. Still others are opening ethnic cultural centers or bringing in more minority speakers to make their campus more appealing.

The University of New Hampshire, for example, says it will focus its recruiting efforts on Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, among other large cities in the Northeast. Admissions counselors and some faculty members will be expected to build relationships with high-school guidance counselors, teachers, and black community leaders, university officials say.

Critics argue that it is illogical to try to prop up black enrollment in states where the black population is minuscule.

"I'd get rid of all race-exclusive policies," says Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York. "I don't want to see anything smacking of, 'We're not interested in talking to whites or Asians, because we've got enough of them already.' I don't think that's what the civil-rights movement was all about. I think it was about opening doors and getting beyond all this racial sorting."

Ms. Thernstrom -- who co-wrote America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, 1997), with her husband, Stephan Thernstrom, a Harvard University historian -- is opposed as well to cultural centers for ethnic groups. She believes that they promote segregation.

But most college administrators believe that enrolling more black students is an important goal, and that creating a comfortable environment is the first step.

"Students of color in New England, in Ohio, in the middle of nowhere are not likely to see themselves reflected in their communities, so they must be reflected in other ways," says Beverly Daniel Tatum, dean of Mount Holyoke College and author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations About Race (Basic Books, 1997).

At Mount Holyoke, where black students make up about 4 per cent of the population, students of any race can participate in a year-long exchange program with Spelman College, a historically black institution in Atlanta. And Mount Holyoke has six cultural centers -- five of which have opened since 1995 -- to serve black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, and lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students. (The sixth is an intercultural center.)

Ms. Tatum, who is black, says she is perusing college guidebooks for her son, a high-school junior, as he begins his college search. Specifically, she's looking for statistics on the proportion of black students and faculty members. "Students of color do better in places where they are not tokenized," she says.

Other educators say the secret is in the marketing. "When colleges are developing their glossy materials, they think that a picture of a minority person on the cover will say it all," explains Herman G. Green, director of Clemson University's Center for the Study of the Black Experience in Higher Education. However, he says, "when they're packaging the institution, they should identify the things that are attractive to minority students," such as the availability of African-American-related courses and majors, and tutoring services.

In addition to demanding higher black enrollment and more black professors, the protesters at New Hampshire asked for a full-time black counselor. Mr. Jackson, the New Hampshire senior, points out that black students there often find it difficult to talk to a white counselor about racial issues. Toward the end of his sophomore year, one of his best friends from Boston was shot and killed in a car-jacking incident. He didn't even think of going to the counselors, he says, because he did not feel comfortable talking to them about urban violence. Instead, he took a semester off and taught a workshop on violence prevention in Boston.

Mr. Jackson -- who chose New Hampshire because it offered him more financial aid than several historically black colleges he had considered -- now often accompanies recruiters when they meet with prospective black students.

"I'm really honest with them," he says. "I tell them that you get challenged on who and what you are on a daily basis. If you're unable to deal on that level, it can be a frustrating experience."

University officials say the campus offers a more diverse environment than is suggested by statistics alone. For example,
many faculty members include elements of black culture and history in their classes.

"The numbers are not great at this point," says Mark Rubinstein, vice-provost for enrollment management. "But when you get behind the two-dimensional numbers to the three-dimensional people, the students will find this is a much better atmosphere than they might imagine."

New Hampshire's plan to recruit more heavily in urban areas is modeled after a system that Pennsylvania State University
developed 15 years ago. With its largest campus, University Park, in a small town, Penn State created regional recruiting offices in the three urban centers of the state: Harrisburg, which is about 100 miles from the main campus, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, about 200 miles away.

The offices recruit students for all 22 Penn State campuses. But while University Park is farther from the three cities than are some other campuses, many students prefer the main campus, because it's the most competitive, and it's where most of the university's four-year degree programs are offered.

Each center is staffed by three to five admissions counselors, who visit community churches and organizations and arrange bus trips to the university system's campuses.

"If potential students need to pick something up, they can go downtown instead of just calling University Park and being
bounced from office to office," says Edwin M. Escalet, director of minority admissions and community affairs for the Penn State system.

Some 3,141 black undergraduates (4.2 per cent of the student population) are enrolled in the Penn State system this year, up from 2,321 (3.4 per cent) in 1994.

Officials at some colleges say their efforts to recruit minority students are set back by widely publicized racial incidents.

Last fall, a "ghetto party" sponsored by a fraternity and sorority at Dartmouth College was featured in The New York Times and on the late-night talk show Politically Incorrect. Some white students had dressed as "gangsta rap" musicians, wearing Afro wigs and carrying toy guns. Protests were held even after the event's sponsors apologized.

Dartmouth officials say the incident may have contributed to a decline in applications from black students, from 384 a year ago to 320 this year.

"Once it hit the national press, we did get several calls from students and families asking, 'What's going on?'" says Karl M. Furstenberg, dean of admissions and associate provost. "We think it did have an effect on the application numbers."

Still, the proportion of black students at Dartmouth has remained steady, at about 5 per cent of the undergraduate population, for several years, he says.

At other colleges, black enrollment has grown despite dissatisfaction among current students. At Duke University, for example, black students have repeatedly called for administrators to improve race relations. In April 1997, two white campus-police officers were punished after they falsely arrested a black undergraduate.

The number of black students in Duke's freshman class has risen from 97 in 1988-89 (6.7 per cent of the class) to 165 this year (9.7 per cent). Of the nearly 14,000 applicants vying for some 1,600 slots in next year's class, 1,000 are black, a record number for the university.

Duke has stepped up its minority-recruitment efforts in recent years. On recruiting trips to Chicago and Atlanta last year, for example, officials held separate events for black prospective students. "We looked at the students in our prospect files whose races we knew, and we invited them to the programs in Atlanta and Chicago," says Christoph O. Guttentag, director of undergraduate admissions.

Starting with last year's entering class, Duke also increased the amount in a scholarship program for African-American students from $6,000 to $18,000 per year. The university awards about five of the scholarships, which cover three-quarters of its tuition, each year.

Duke's efforts seem to have paid off. It was ranked No. 20 in a list of the top 50 colleges for black students, published last year by Black Enterprise magazine. The list, which had Spelman and eight other historically black institutions at the top, was based on academic and social factors as well as on the enrollment and graduation rates of black students.

"I think our location in the South helps us," Mr. Guttentag says. "I think that there's still the tendency on the part of a significant number of people to think there's an uncomfortable and unwelcoming atmosphere for African-Americans in the South, but people who live here know that that's simply not the case."

That Duke's black enrollment is increasing despite some racial tension on the campus suggests that the incidents themselves may not be as important to black students as the college's response.

"Most high-school students don't keep up with the news, as far as I'm concerned," says Carol M. Jackson, a guidance counselor at Burke High School, in Omaha, who wrote a chapter about the college-selection process in The Black Student's Guide to College Success (Greenwood Press, 1994). Parents and guidance counselors are more likely to be aware of racial problems on college campuses, but such knowledge rarely influences a student's decision about which college to attend, Ms. Jackson believes.

"Every university in the United States has a problem from time to time," she says. "African Americans know that."

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