College struggles to improve diversity

In print | November 17, 2005

African-American first-year enrollment at Swarthmore College in 2005 was up 12 percent from 2004, according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. But according to the survey, black students made up only seven percent of the first-year class, well below the percentage of blacks in the general population. Furthermore, the size of the black community has not been consistently increasing over the last decade; the number of black first-years in this year’s class, 28, is far below the number that matriculated in 1998, when 11.6 percent of the incoming class was African-American.

Bruce Slater, managing editor for JBHE, said the new statistics reflected the varying degree of success that Swarthmore has had in recruiting top black students.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” Slater said. “I don’t necessarily say it’s a problem, I just think there’s a great competition for top black students among all the top colleges and universities, and they’re competing against their peers and trying to get a small group of top students. So, some years they do well and some years they don’t.”

“We need more black students, and we need more black male students,” Tim Sams, assistant dean and director of the Black Cultural Center, said. “Other elite colleges are competing. I think we have not yet become competitive, and it relates to black men, and it relates to black students in general. We can’t compete with the big dogs yet [such as Williams, Amherst, Wesleyan, Harvard and Princeton]. I don’t know if they have higher percentages, but their populations have been growing, and ours has not,” Sams said.

Over the past several years, Swarthmore has had one of the largest black communities percentage-wise, compared with other colleges and universities. In fact, according to JBHE, as of 2004 among liberal arts colleges only Amherst and Wesleyan had larger percentages of black students than Swarthmore. But other schools have been catching up to Swarthmore.

Small schools such as Amherst, Williams and Haverford have all seen the size of their black student populations increase, as Swarthmore has watched its black population fluctuate.

While every staff member interviewed for this article echoed the belief that Swarthmore needs to recruit more minority students, it is unclear whether the college has concrete goals on the issue.

In the January 2003 case Gratz vs. Bollinger, the Supreme Court ruled that the Michigan admissions policy, in which black, Hispanic and Native American students were given 20 points on an admissions rating scale, was unconstitutional. The decision did not find affirmative action in admissions in general to be unconstitutional, but it has given the impression that admissions practices favoring students of color are under attack.

“We have preference for [several] categories — development, athletics, race — so we absolutely practice affirmative action,” Jim Bock ‘90, dean of admissions, said. "Everyone goes through the process equally, there are no points. One is not compared to the other, and it’s hard to say how much weight is given because it’s all about context. We’re in the middle of a capital campaign. We can’t ignore the ability to help us achieve that, to help us continue to give the good financial aid we give. Are you first generation to college? That matters. What percentage of students from your high school go to four year colleges? Because you’re an athlete, how good an athlete are you?" he said.

“Something about athletics, and music and arts, that’s a choice. You choose to participate in sports. You don’t choose your race or your background, so you can’t compare, and I don’t compare preferences for one versus the other. We’ll take all these things into account, but we won’t give points to any one of them. It’s all about the context,” Bock said.

Regardless of race, class or background, Sams, who also acts as an advisor for the admissions department, said the ability to perform academically is the first criteria for any applicant to Swarthmore.

“I would say that diversity is one of the 10 or 11 things that go into the selection consideration,” he said.

“I would say it is considered, but all students are considered after the academic excellence criteria is filled. I’m certain that’s first. And if one considers that, that that is the first hurtle, then, in very much the same way that one might think it important to have more engineers, or more students in the arts, there are also many who believe it is equally important to have more Asians, more Latinos. That’s how I understand it,” Sams said.

The importance of academic excellence versus race, talent, giving-potential or any other factor is difficult to determine independently because the college does not release much data on its applicant pool nor on the success of students after they are admitted. For example, on the college’s institutional research Web site the school announced that in 2004, the retention rate for students who had entered the previous year was 95 percent, but the college does not break this figure down into any subcomponent groups.

What is unquestionable is that admission to Swarthmore is competitive for anyone. According to an internal admissions department document, over 50 percent of applicants in all minority groups were rejected for the class of 2009. But race is certainly a factor. 46 percent of African-American applicants were accepted, while the overall acceptance rate for the class of 2009 was only 22 percent.

The first hurdle: applicants

The number of minority students that attend Swarthmore is a product of two factors: how many students apply, and how many ultimately matriculate. From year to year, the number of students in various racial categories that are accepted to Swarthmore is closely related to the number of students that apply. For example, in 2003, of the 419 Asian-American students that applied, 153 were admitted, or 36.5 percent. A year later, the number of accepted Asian-Americans jumped to 183, but so did the number of applicants, to 504. The percentage — 36.3 percent — thus stayed the same. The class of 2009 has more Latino students than any class in the last five years, but it also had more students accepted than any class in that period, and more applicants, with the exception of 2002. So the two most important questions are: What is Swarthmore doing to get more black students to apply, and how does Swarthmore get those students who are accepted to attend Swarthmore?

The number of black applicants has changed over the last five years, but not in any observable pattern. In 2000, 289 black students applied. In 2001, the number dropped to 179. Last year, that number was 227.

“We’ve only upped the efforts to try and recruit these students. What I think has changed is that other schools are doing what we’ve always been doing,” Bock said. “More people are doing outreach for the same limited number of students. For instance, [one thing] we weren’t doing in the mid-90s was Discovery Weekend. We did not have a fly-in program for students; we’re in the sixth or seventh year of that. Every school does that now,” Bock said.

Another part of the problem is that the pool of qualified minority students is shrinking. “I want to make sure I have the correct numbers, but I think it is something like 50 percent of African-American males don’t graduate from high school, so it’s a finite pool, and even more of a limited pool for places like Swarthmore,” Bock said.

Darryl Smaw, associate dean of multicultural affairs, agreed with Bock’s assessment. “I think the data begins to demonstrate that in terms of black students, particularly black males, you’ve got more black males that are, unfortunately, incarcerated than you have going to college, period. But also in that mix you have, across the board, many more women going into higher education than men,” Smaw said.

Yield challenges

While Swarthmore faces the same obstacles as many other colleges over the last several years, its results have not been the same. In 2004, JBHE did a survey on the integration of black students at the top 25 liberal arts colleges in the country. The survey used the percentage of black students and faculty, as well as graduation rates and several other factors, to determine its rankings. What the journal found was that, “the percentage of blacks in the first-year class at Swarthmore has dropped severely in recent years. In fact, over the past six years Swarthmore has had the largest percentage point drop in black freshmen of any school in this survey.”

Despite the drop, Swarthmore remained, and remains, one of the best-integrated liberal arts colleges in the country, at least by the numbers. Of the 24 schools that responded to the survey, Swarthmore had the third highest level of blacks as a percentage of the student body, behind only Amherst and Wesleyan. Overall, the college was ranked seventh in the survey.

And yet, as one of the smaller liberal arts colleges, the raw number of black students at Swarthmore remains small. “Our mass of black students is no longer critical. We’re suffering in our black student community because we don’t have a critical mass of students,” Sams said.

Bock agreed with Sams’ assessment but stressed that the problem was nationwide. “Out of 4,085 applications last year we had 83 black males apply. That’s a problem. And yet, we’re still the seventh-ranked college in the country? How scary is that? That’s the other thing that I struggle with [in the JBHE article]; the language they use is pretty severe, but we’re seventh in the country. That in and of itself is indicative of the crisis we’re facing and how difficult it is,” Bock said.

While Bock, Sams and Smaw all agreed that they wanted to make sure that Swarthmore had a critical mass of minority students, it is difficult to understand what “critical mass,” means, especially after the Michigan case.

“Critical mass is hard to quantify in numbers,” Smaw said. “I see it as proportional to the institution. If you’ve got an 1,800 member student body, it’s hard to quantify versus someone who has a 5,000 member student body. But a critical mass is determined by the number of students in each group who feel that they have a comfort level that says, I feel good about myself and I feel that there are enough people around who look like me who make me feel that my community is here, and I have a comfort level in which I am able to reach out and meet other people but still have a solid grounding in who I am in my own group,” he said.

One student interviewed said that the state of the black community on campus was unimportant to him.

“I don’t think that was an issue at all for me,” Sean Anderson ‘06 said. "I was mostly concerned with the academics. When I visited I got a really good impression of the school, and I’d heard that Swarthmore was ranked number one at the time," he said. Anderson had attended a private high school, where the racial makeup of the student body had been similar to Swarthmore.

But for other African-American students, Swarthmore’s black community did factor into their decision. Brandon Washington ‘08 said that the statistics were not as important to him as the administration’s commitment to supporting minority students. “I wanted to be confident that [Swarthmore] could address common concerns and needs of minority students rather than just finding people who were like me,” he said.

For Patrice Berry ‘06, the issue was also the state of the community and the support it offered, not its size. "When I looked for colleges, it wasn’t really the thing I looked for, because something I realized was that some of my friends who went to [historically black colleges and universities], and even UPenn for example, where there was a large number of black people, it didn’t really matter because there wasn’t that close relationship," Patrice Berry ‘06 said. "That’s not to say that critical mass isn’t important. I just think if I had to choose between the two I would rather have the small close community than a large number of black people that don’t communicate with one another."

Keith Benjamin ‘09 agreed. "I don’t think it’s [the size of the community] that important. I think it’s actually the connection between the community and how we relate to each other."

Nationwide comparisons

On the national level, critical mass is a factor when African-Americans choose where to study, but it is far from the only factor. The U.S. Department of Education released a report earlier this year on the preferences of high school seniors in the class of 2004. The report found that while students of color are more conscious of race than whites are when they apply to colleges, other factors are more important. Only 31 percent of African-American seniors in the survey said that the racial makeup of the student body was “very important” to them in making their decision. About the same percentage said an active social life (35.4 ) or being able to live at home (29.1) was very important. The survey found that a larger number of African-Americans believe the academic reputation of the college (66.3%) and graduate school placement (60%) to be very important.

But to some black students, the makeup of the student body can be a decisive factor. “We had a student this year who got $38,000 here, $2,000 at another school and $0 at another school,” Bock said. “They chose the school where they got zero, and it was a historically black college, and they wanted to go there. That wasn’t about aid. I know that because a counselor told me. I ran into this counselor at our national conference in Tampa, and that person sought me out just to say … ‘what more could you do?’ That’s how hard it is. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what we do,” he said. Bock was quick to add that the college had only met the student’s need; Swarthmore has a need-blind policy for all admissions. However, this policy may hurt Swarthmore because some schools are willing to offer more than only need-based financial assistance. For example, in 2001, Princeton University replaced its student loan program with full grants, enabling Princeton graduates to leave the university without any loans.

Bock did not feel that finance was necessarily the primary reason for the new competition.

“Often times it’s a cultural fit. We may admit someone and they decide Swarthmore is not for me. Some years are more successful than others. Two years ago we yielded a really good number of African-American males, last year we dropped. What changed? Not a lot. Their choices did,” Bock said.

The role of students

While the admissions department recruits and accepts students, many prospective students ultimately decide whether to enroll at Swarthmore based on what they discover when they visit the campus.

“We have a program called the SMORE program, which stands for Swarthmore Multicultural Outreach and Recruitment Effort,” Suzi Nam, director of the multicultural outreach program in the admissions office, said. “It’s a student program where Swatties get matched with a number of prospective students and they e-mail them throughout the year, maybe host them at Discovery Weekend and answer all their questions.”

Nam said that Discovery Weekend, an annual event when Swarthmore flies approximately 150 minority students to the college, is a key part in the recruitment process. “I think we’re lucky because we have a lot of [current] students involved in the process. We always want more, but I think some places don’t involve their students very much at all,” Nam said.

Saeed Ola ’07, Vice President of the Swarthmore African-American Student Society, said that Discovery Weekend was a key part of recruiting more minority students. “Discovery Weekend is very important, especially for those looking for support as a minority student. It gives you the opportunity to meet with other minority students on campus or other minority students who may potentially be applying to Swarthmore. It gives those students seeking a minority support system to begin to delve into those support systems at Swarthmore,” Ola said.

Smaw felt that student involvement would be a key feature if Swarthmore is to improve on its record of minority recruitment in the future. “I could stand there as a dean and say ‘welcome, I’m here to provide support and services for you,’ and I say that, and parents are pleased to know that Swarthmore is doing such a great job in having a faculty and staff of color but the key is, what are students going to be saying about the institution?” Smaw said.

Bock used even stronger language. “I don’t know if people sense that this is an issue. We think it’s a primary issue that we face all the time, but I don’t have people banging down my door,” he said.

“I’m not looking for another cause for students, but this is a serious issue. I am saying we need your help. I’m not trying to say we’re not responsible for it, but we need everyone’s help if they think it matters. I think when you look at the aggregate it’s pretty good, but when you look specifically at different categories we do better in some and less well in others, but we’re always trying to improve,” he said.