Most college fairs don’t feature drag performers in habits. But on a Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, “sisters” mingle with prospective students in a courtyard dotted with fan palms. The recruits pick up rainbow pamphlets about resources at Michigan State University, coming-out stories by Carleton College students and alumni, and events listings for the California Institute of Technology’s annual “Gaypril.”
Armando Igari-Salazar, a prospective student from East Los Angeles, surveys the displays of 17 colleges and feels more assured than he did graduating from high school five years ago. “Now I see that there’s the support, that they embrace who I am,” he says.
The population of openly gay applicants is becoming more visible, and colleges are stepping up efforts to recruit them. While students search for campuses where they’ll fit in, admissions and other campus officials try to extend a deft welcome, even to those who don’t seek it.
“Some colleges want to use it as part of their branding, their marketing—that they’re a friendly campus,” says David A. Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Antibullying campaigns and evolving social norms, he says, have made advocates of that approach less concerned that top administrators may disapprove.
Numbers can also open minds. Secondary schools around the country are now home to 3,000 gay-straight alliances, according to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, an advocacy group. By its most recent estimate, in 2004, at least 750,000 high-school students were out of the closet, and 90 percent of them planned to go to college. Surveys and studies have put the average coming-out age at 16 or 17 and say it’s getting younger.
One measure of colleges’ outreach is the growth of dedicated fairs. The national advocacy group Campus Pride held its first college fair in 2007; this year the event in Los Angeles is one of six nationwide. About 200 institutions have taken part, from Appalachian State University, in North Carolina, to Gustavus Adolphus College and Normandale Community College, in Minnesota, to Whitman College, in Washington. The Hetrick-Martin Institute, which runs programs for gay and lesbian youths in New York, now limits its annual fair to 50 colleges, for space.
But setting up a folding table is easy; strategically recruiting gay students is complicated and sensitive. A college that opts to do anything may be subtle, choosing a viewbook photograph with a rainbow flag in the background or briefly pointing out a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender center on campus tours. The University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College, among other institutions, have become bolder, trying to identify gay applicants to contact directly.
But without the equivalent of a racial or ethnic box to check, gay students are largely invisible. Campus Pride and other advocates have lobbied the Common Application’s Board of Directors for an optional check box, arguing that for colleges it would generate lists of gay recruits, and for students it would convey official recognition.
The Common Application, however, declined in January to add a sexual-orientation question. It had begun including “LGBT” in a drop-down list of student activities, but its board decided that asking students, even optionally, to disclose if they were gay was too touchy. “One common worry was that any potential benefits to adding the question would be outweighed by the anxiety and uncertainty students may experience when deciding if and how they should answer it,” the board said in a statement.
Although many campus officials equate gay-student and minority-student outreach, recruiting applicants of diverse sexual orientations poses unique challenges. Students apply to college in various stages of coming out. Their parents and college counselors may not know. Some applicants fear discrimination or hope for preferential treatment. Under those conditions, rolling out a welcome mat can be tricky.
Waiting Behind Tables
At the Los Angeles fair, pitches are general. Not all students here will want to join a gay campus group or take a gender-studies course. And they’re as diverse demographically as straight high-school students.
“I try not to make assumptions about who they are and what they’re looking for,” says Scott A. McIntyre, associate director of admissions for recruitment and high-school outreach at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. “To me it’s more important to treat them like I treat any student at a college fair.”
Alanna M. Boyd, a lesbian alumna of Mount Holyoke College, greets onlookers with a memorable refrain: “Mount Holyoke is the oldest all-women’s college in the country!” Ms. Boyd, whose former classmate is the associate dean of admissions and tapped her for the event, goes on to describe Mount Holyoke’s tight-knit community and nine-to-one student-to-faculty ratio before casually mentioning its annual drag ball and Jeanette Marks House, a “queer space” named for a former president’s partner.
At the Penn table, KeAndra D. Dodds fields candid questions. One visitor asks Ms. Dodds, a 2008 graduate and a former leader of Penn’s Queer People of Color, if she felt comfortable being out in the black campus community. Generally she did, she says; she also organized campus forums on multiple identities.
Mr. Igari-Salazar, the prospective student from East LA, takes colleges’ presence at the fair as a sign of their openness and instead explores academics, chatting with a Syracuse University alumna about the communications major there. Alexx Souter, a home-schooled student from Lakewood, Calif., inquires about theater and prelaw programs, as well as accommodations for learning disabilities. She twirls a lollipop in her mouth as she listens to a representative from Antioch University at Los Angeles.
Attendance is sparse—only 50 students and relatives—and in long lapses between visitors, Scott C. Kleinheksel reflects on other purposes of the fair, like visibility. “It’s definitely a good selling point for colleges to say they go to these things,” says Mr. Kleinheksel, a gay alumnus of Carleton who now works as a marketing strategist in LA.
If a college promotes its participation, he says, prospective students elsewhere may notice. He also values the affirmative effect on those who do come. “This event is important and amazing for high-school students,” he says, “to see that there are colleges here.”
Ms. Boyd, a director of development at nearby Harvey Mudd College, counts just three interest cards that students have filled out but doesn’t second-guess her attendance, which cost the college little more than shipping a box of brochures. “It’s absolutely worth sending me a Priority Mail package and asking me to take three hours out of my day,” she says.
Still, she seems a little disappointed: “I haven’t had as many folks stop by as I would love.” She spots a few female students who haven’t come to her table and considers approaching them.
Tagged Applicants
Penn seeks out and goes after gay students. Hoping they will attend a fair or check out the university’s LGBT Center online isn’t enough, says Eric J. Furda, dean of admissions. “We’re trying to leave less to chance.”
Last year Penn’s admissions staff began scanning applications for references to sexual orientation—in a list of activities or a personal essay—and tagging some “LGBT,” to contact those students if they are admitted. To be tagged, applicants must not only mention being gay but also show interest in gay life. “It has to come from a student saying, ‘I want this community,’” says Jordan E. Pascucci, a regional director of admissions and LGBT liaison. Any signs of tension, familial or otherwise, keep students off the list.
Last year 39 tagged applicants were among those Penn admitted; this year 78 were. A greater proportion of this incoming freshman class may be openly gay or have chosen to come out in the application process, Ms. Pascucci says. But she likes to think that more gay students are considering Penn—and that application readers are getting better at identifying them. About half of the tagged applicants are minority students, she says, perhaps because they’re more used to discussing identity.
The list of students goes to the LGBT Center, which reaches out just as Penn’s Makuu Black Cultural Center and La Casa Latina do. The message: “We’re here for you if you need us,” says Robert Schoenberg, the LGBT Center’s director. He pairs prospective and current students, not customizing the matches too much—maybe by gender and major or home state—and shares little beyond names and e-mail addresses with the peer advisers. “We have to be very careful who has access to that information,” he says. He encourages quick congratulations and introductions, not “many-screen e-mails.”
Victor Galli, a junior majoring in biochemistry, tells prospective freshmen that he’s social chair of the Queer Student Alliance at Penn. It’s a “pretty generic message,” he says: “Hi, my name is Victor. Here’s what I’m involved in. If you have any questions, let me know.”
“It’s inappropriate in this type of outreach to send someone a message that says, ‘Hey, I heard you’re queer,’” Mr. Galli says. If he gets no response, he doesn’t write again.
So far the students Penn recruits this way enroll at the same rate as do those in its general pool. But with early connections to the campus community, freshmen last fall tended to get involved and take on leadership roles more quickly, good signs for student engagement, say Mr. Schoenberg and Ms. Pascucci.
They have led workshops on recruitment at a couple of conferences, and this year, Ms. Pascucci says, about 10 colleges have inquired about Penn’s model. Last summer representatives from American University visited while developing a similar process.
Matthew Bruno, program coordinator at American’s GLBTA Resource Center (whose abbreviation includes “allies”), gave admissions officials a gay vocabulary list: GSA, or gay-straight alliance, the name of many high-school clubs; “pride” groups or events; Pflag, or Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; and Glsen, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. This spring the admissions office returned a list of about 100 accepted students.
The center sent them a welcome e-mail—more private than postal mail, Mr. Bruno says—with careful wording. “It’s more of a, ‘Hey, here are some resources,’ as opposed to, ‘We think you should use these resources.’” It also offers to match students with peer advisers.
Some students may be taken aback or not welcome the contact, he says, but the benefits of outreach outweigh those risks: “We’ve had those conversations, and we decided to go this route and kind of see if there are any ramifications.”
Philosophies of Outreach
Dartmouth has been more discreet, basing its outreach on interest, not identity, which campus officials don’t want to presume, says S. Caroline Kerr, an associate director of admissions.
Two years ago the college added two new interests to a menu on its Common Application supplement: “LGBT community” and “gender identity.” Students who haven’t come out to their parents, teachers, or college counselors, the thinking goes, may be able to complete the supplement with less supervision than, say, the essay.
Dartmouth’s admissions office maintains a list of applicants with those interests and sends a welcome e-mail to accepted students on behalf of the college’s LGBTQA adviser. For the second time this year, those recruits have been invited to a live video chat on gay issues in Dartmouth’s Chatapalooza series for admitted students. (They type questions for on-screen Dartmouth students and staff to answer.)
The number of students on the list, now more than 100, has increased by 40 to 50 percent in each of the past two admissions cycles. Those students have enrolled at the same rate as ones who have demonstrated interest by, for example, visiting the campus.
As at Penn, recent classes of freshmen have been more involved, says Ms. Kerr, who coordinates the outreach. “We’ve had a pretty notable increase in really active, excited incoming students who hit the ground running.”
Philosophies on outreach vary by campus. Vincent E. Vigil, director of the LGBT Resource Center at the University of Southern California, prefers not to contact students directly. “We try to give them all the information,” he says. “We don’t want to force anything.”
One piece of information is a “Trojan Pride” guide, geared toward prospective students. “As you begin to consider USC, please look beyond our 155-acre campus filled with beautiful Renaissance-style buildings, plazas, fountains and parks,” it says. “You should also think about our supportive campus climate.” The guide includes welcome messages from administrators and highlights LGBT programs and student groups, as well as admissions and financial-aid information.
A student group, OutReach, has visited several dozen high schools in Los Angeles and Orange Counties to talk with gay students about the college-application process. The mission isn’t just recruitment but also support, Mr. Vigil says: “If it’s USC or if it’s not USC, we want you to go to college.”
American University, Rutgers University, and Elmhurst College, in Illinois, also reach out to nearby high schools. In February, Towson University, near Baltimore, welcomed about 100 local students for an annual leadership symposium and dance party.
That event helped develop a broader campaign, says Maren J. Greathouse, director of LGBT-student development at Towson. “We’ve tried to brand ourselves as the LGBT institution of choice in central Maryland.”
The All-Important Decision
Building a reputation means brandishing accolades, which the LGBT community now hands out. The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, published in 2006, profiles the country’s 100 “best campuses” for those students, calculating the “gay-point average” of each. And Campus Pride maintains an LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index, evaluating policies, programs, and practices to generate a score of zero to five stars. Colleges that do well emblazon their Web sites and recruitment materials with logos and citations.
Zach Galliger saw one such reference last year during Welcome Days for accepted students at Case Western Reserve University. Mr. Galliger, an aspiring biomedical engineer from Bowling Green, Ohio, liked Case Western for its academic qualities. Then, in a slide show, the university included its Advocate distinction.
“I got really, really excited about that and said, ‘Yes, I have to come here,’” he recalls. “That kind of like sealed the deal for me.”
Zach’s mother, Laura Galliger, felt confident, too. “Wherever your child goes,” she says, “you want him to feel safe and secure.”
Matt Gottesfeld, a junior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, in New York, recently began his college search. He made a first cut based on the LGBT index scores, feeling that if his options were gay-friendly enough, he could explore other elements of campus life.
He is considering the University of Chicago, Ithaca College, Penn, and Vanderbilt University, among others; now come the tours. (“Extremely tiring,” he says.)
On each visit, he approaches a student or two with questions about the gay community. How large is it? How active? Are administrators supportive? He says he’s looking for a place where a president doesn’t just say, “‘Oh, we like gays,’ but really knows the issues.”
Fairs and pamphlets and welcome messages help, Mr. Gottesfeld says, but current students know how a campus feels, if the sense of community is strong. “If you ask around, kids are going to be honest with you,” he says. “Any gay kid would tell another gay kid.”
