Northwestern wanted Lindsay Adams. As part of a university program for minority students, the high school senior was flown to campus a day before Discover NU, the preview weekend for prospective admitted students — and she loved what she found. The school welcomed her with open arms, the students were friendly and the weather held up, Adams said. Her enthusiastic hosts even planned a get-together for the prospective students at the African American Student Affairs House.
“I was banking on coming,” she said in an online interview.
But despite Northwestern’s best efforts, Adams said she would instead attend the University of Richmond.
Adams may be but one accepted black student who won’t be in Evanston this fall, but she’s a part of what Northwestern’s black leaders have seen as a worrying trend. They and the university have known for years that black enrollment has been halved over the past four decades, and Northwestern now has a host of programs to counter that decline — but it’s not obvious that they’re working.
Despite admitting more black students, flying some in to visit campus before the others and devoting four employees solely to minority enrollment, NU still only saw 87 black freshmen matriculate this year.
The “fly-in” program, for instance, has been around for a decade or more, said Tamara Hadaway, assistant director of admissions and co-coordinator of African-American recruitment. Ten years ago, black enrollment was 5.9 percent, which is where it still is now.
This year doesn’t bring an improved outlook: The number of black students was one of the smallest totals in years, comprising 4.2 percent of the overall student population. Though the university is still unsure about final numbers because of waitlist fluctuations, that’s less than half of what it was in 1973.
“This is an issue that black alumni have been discussing with the university for probably five or six years now,” said C. Cole Dillon, a SESP graduate who until recently was the head of the Northwestern Black Alumni Association. “I believe that Northwestern’s black student community is at the point whether you can question its continued viability.”
Cole Dillon thinks that the root of the problem is the university’s denial of it. “The most important thing in making any kind of change is you have to change your mind,” she said.
But Northwestern Provost Dan Linzer isn’t pleased either. “We definitely are not satisfied with the number of African American students in the incoming first-year class or in the total undergraduate population,” he said in an e-mail, and the university continues to work on getting more admitted black students to enroll. He notes that the number of black applicants and admits grew this year, though the yield didn’t keep pace.
Northwestern was listed as one of “four high-ranking universities” that saw a decline in black admissions in the past decade, according to a recent article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
Studies from the National Center for Education Statistics show an increase in the number of black students enrolled in degree-granting institutions between 1976 and 2005, roughly the same period that Northwestern’s enrollment has shrunk. By 2005, colleges across the country had 13-percent black enrollment. For the class of 2011, about five percent of Northwestern students who enrolled in fall of 2007 were black, according to the Office of Undergraduate Admission.
Weinberg senior Mark Crain, the former president of For Members Only, said the school’s black alumni have a responsibility in addressing the issue with the school, and that conversations have been ongoing between Cole Dillon and President Henry Bienen, Vice President William Banis, and Mills.
Crain wants FMO, a student group which bills itself on its Web site as “the voice of the black community here at Northwestern,” to pair up with Northwestern Student Ambassadors, which functions as a liaison between black undergraduates, prospective students’ families and the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Although FMO focused more last school year on strengthening the black community already present at Northwestern, Crain said that FMO will be better equipped financially to put on a show for students this year.
“We wanted to make sure that at the point when we’re ready for this huge push for black enrollment, we’re actually showing them a unified, strong, black community,” he said.
Making exceptions
“Our problem is not that black students are not getting accepted or applying, it’s getting them to matriculate,” said Weinberg senior Jessica Bell, co-coordinator of the Northwestern Student Ambassadors.
Linzer agreed, and said the university will analyze this year’s admitted students “to make adjustments next year.”
To show NU’s black community to prospective students, the university has been inviting students to the “fly-in” program to see campus a day before the other students arrive, according to Bell.
“It can be overwhelming, so it’s designed so that we introduce our prospies to the black community,” Bell said. “We invite our alumni and Greek life to show them that there is a sense of community and how you can find your own niche.”
Bell said she oversees student volunteers who call prospective black students during the fall of their senior year to get them excited about Northwestern, and calls once more during the spring to encourage them to attend Discover NU.
But the recruitment process starts before high school students apply. As of May, the admissions office had four employees who target black and Hispanic prospective students, according to Onis Cheathams, associate director of admissions at Northwestern. They visit high schools with large minority student populations — in Chicago, Georgia and Los Angeles, for example — to entice potential applicants.
The admissions office is also affiliated with minority outreach organizations such as Prep for Prep, a New York-based group that links minority students to private schools. The group brings students to colleges nationwide, including Northwestern, for student-hosted visits. Cheathams said she follows up via e-mail and sends students information.
A historical struggle
According to historical archives from FMO, prior to 1966, Northwestern was “essentially homogeneous in racial, religious, and socioeconomic terms.”
“Race is not a problem because the Negro does not exist here,” one black student wrote in a letter to The Daily Northwestern in the spring of 1966.
That changed quickly, for in the fall the university saw the arrival of 54 black freshmen. In less than ten years, the number of entering black freshmen went from five in 1965 to 186 eight years later (by comparison, the fall of 2007 saw just 111). During the same period, black enrollment swelled to 700, or ten percent of undergraduates. The increase stemmed from university administrators recruiting blacks from urban areas, mainly Chicago. However, the university was unaware of the implications a significant black presence would have on the schools social structure, and that the social scene was “generally inhospitable” to black students.
Shortly after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., racial tensions reached a peak as between 110 and 120 black students occupied the Bursar’s Office on Clark Street and presented the university with a list of demands.
Student leaders and university officials quickly agreed to enhance, “both qualitatively and quantitatively, the role of black men and women in the activities of the University.” Northwestern agreed to increase the number of black applicants so that the percentage of African-Americans at the school was reflective of the national population, to introduce black studies into the curriculum, consult black students about future employment decisions that impacted them and to create a center where black students could congregate.
But the number has diminished since then.
A slow fade
“It’s really heartbreaking that, 40 years later, we have the same set of concerns being expressed by students,” Cole Dillon said.
She also mentioned economic constraints as an obstacle. Although financial aid is offered to those students who can demonstrate need, forms like the FAFSA do not have a space for students to explain familial monetary obligations. Some youths are expected by their families to care for their immediate and extended families financially, and this economic strain is neither recognized nor cared for by the university, Cole Dillon said.
For his part, Linzer said financial aid is 99-percent need-blind, and “race and ethnicity do not enter the equation.”
Northwestern also recently announced it was joining a no-loan financial aid program, and “this should have a significant impact on the attractiveness of Northwestern to a number of under-represented minority applicants,” Linzer said.
“When I was a student, Northwestern had implemented a program that expressly went after underprivileged but academically qualified inner-city students,” Cole Dillon said. “I don’t believe that today’s inner-city student would have the same opportunity at Northwestern that students in my era had, which is a shame considering that Northwestern is contiguous to probably the largest urban community in the country,” she said, referring to Chicago.
Cole Dillon believes that while Northwestern can take some credit for contributing to the strong middle- and upper-class black communities that exist, it should also take responsibility for not giving all blacks the equal opportunity to cross “that economic and intellectual ravine.”
Ultimately, Crain believes there is no reason why the numbers shouldn’t be higher at Northwestern.
“You can’t make excuses like, ‘The pool is shrinking,’ or other excuses like that because other institutions of this caliber do have higher enrollments,” Crain said. “At the end of the day, other institutions aren’t failing like we are to attract black students.”
Evaluating the community
During the spring, letters were sent out to accepted black students encouraging them to visit and enroll in Northwestern. To create a connection between hosts and prospective students, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions attempted to match students based on demographics, major or common interests. Students were also asked if they would like to be matched based on race.
“Sometimes students don’t want to be matched by race,” Bell said. “They don’t want to be singled out. If you grew up in a white town and went to a white high school, you might feel more at ease if you were with the average NU student.”
Weinberg freshman Celeste Gilyard said the community did play a role in her decision but hoped that interaction with people from different backgrounds would ease the transition.
“Although I did hear it was a diverse school, I also heard that there weren’t as many African-Americans as some of the other minorities at the school,” she said. “But I’ve always gotten along with a lot of people, and my high school is kind of the same way.”
The same rang true for Weinberg freshman Adam Thompson-Harvey, who said that the black community was definitely not the deciding factor.
“I just wanted to make sure I would feel comfortable knowing I would have a sizable amount of my race to get to know next year, rather than only having a few in the class,” he said.
Financial aid
Schools like Stanford, Harvard, and Duke are more accommodating of a diverse student population in general, Bell said.
“If your parents make below a certain amount, you can come for free,” she said.
In February, Stanford University announced an enhanced financial aid program in which students whose parents or guardians make less than $100,000 annually will not have to pay tuition.
The west-coast university will cover students whose parents earn less than $60,000 annually for room, board, and other educational expenses. The program follows similar measures put in place by Harvard and Yale to increase aid to undergraduate students, after lawmakers criticized wealthy universities for increasing tuition even as their endowments grew.
Although Northwestern has no such financial aid program in the works compared to Stanford’s, Bell said increasing the black presence on campus starts with the current undergraduate student body.
“If we really want to see a change, we have to get existing students excited about hosting, and getting students to come here,” she said. “We can only work with what we have, and if black students don’t want to host, it will show when prospies visit.”
But prospective black students who visited on Wildcat Days as well as those who did not make the trip shared various sentiments concerning financial aid as well as the size of NU’s black community.
“Ultimately, the decision was to come down to how much money the school gave me,” said Communication freshman Paris West.
Disclosure: Writer Joshua West is a member of For Members Only.