When Leykia Nulan joined the provost’s office at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2015, her mission was to increase the enrollment of black and other minority students.
Nulan, who is now director of freshman admission as well as assistant provost for diversity in enrollment management, soon realized that many promising prospective black students were never making it into the pool of applicants.
Amherst draws a large proportion of its black students from nearby Springfield, Mass. Teachers and counselors there told Nulan they’d been discouraging their students from applying. “They just assumed they would never get in and said, ‘Oh, you’re not going to get in, you don’t have the right grades or testing to even compete,’ kind of taking us off the student’s list before they even got to us,” Nulan says.
Another way students failed to enter the pool was that their Common Application, which can be used to apply to many colleges at once, remained incomplete, even after all application materials were due.
So Nulan and her team contacted those students directly to verify that they were still interested in applying to Amherst. Some were surprised that all their documents had not gone through and sent in the ones that were missing.
From the fall of 2010 to the fall of 2017, Amherst’s African-American enrollment rose to 1,320, from just 1,000, a 32 percent increase. Black students still make up just 5.2 percent of the student body. But the numbers are moving in a positive direction.
That is not the case for black enrollment in college over all. It hit a peak in 2010 and has declined by more than 13 percent since then. Sixty-six percent of recent black high-school graduates enrolled in college in 2010. By 2017 that share had fallen to 58 percent.
Black enrollment took a hit for several reasons. African-American students were disproportionately represented at for-profit colleges, hundreds of which have closed in the past few years. Low unemployment rates have led to enrollment declines at two-year public colleges, where blacks are slightly overrepresented.
The estimated number of black public-high-school graduates in the country has fallen by about 25,000 from 2010 to 2017, meaning the pool is smaller — but that is nowhere near the loss in enrollment of nearly 365,000 black college students over the same period. Some college officials argue the level of decline found in U.S. Department of Education data may appear exaggerated, because an increasing number of students identify themselves as “two or more races,” and others are of unknown race.
Even though African-American enrollment at four-year public institutions grew from 2010 to 2017, it didn’t grow at the same pace as overall enrollment.
Leaders at flagship and land-grant institutions like the University of Florida engage in frequent conversations about how they can do better at enrolling minority students, says Charles Murphy, director of Florida’s freshman and international admissions. “I don’t think there is a university in that group that feels like they’ve arrived.”
Florida’s efforts include holding application-workshop sessions at high schools with large percentages of low-income and first-generation college students and having academic departments reach out to admitted students in the hope that they will feel comfortable about enrolling. The university last year hired its first chief diversity officer.
Other colleges shared their own ideas for increasing the enrollment of black students.
Partnerships. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Nulan and her staff work with Springfield Public Schools, ensuring that Amherst faculty and staff members interact face-to-face with students as often as possible. Through the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education’s 100 Males to College program, the university offers mentors and family-oriented activities to prospective students.
College-application sessions. African-American male staff members at the University of Nevada at Reno began holding monthly meetings about two years ago with black male juniors in high school in Las Vegas. Each session focused on a different aspect of the college-application process. The program, Nevada Scholars of Tomorrow, allows students to meet potential staff and faculty role models as well as peers, and was last year expanded to include black female students, says Everett L. Jackson, director of the university’s Las Vegas Office for Prospective Students. The Reno campus reported that 693 black students were enrolled in the fall of 2017, 48 percent more than in 2010.
Text messages. Staff members at North Carolina State University this year ran a project, supported by a grant through the federal GEAR UP program, in which the university sent text messages to high-school students in counties with low resources. The university used chatbot technology to answer students’ questions about admissions. Ronnie Chalmers, director of strategic initiatives in the university’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, says the project has resulted in stronger student yield.
Summer programs. North Carolina State also offers the Emerging Scholars Academy, a six-day summer program that brings 100 high-school juniors interested in African-American culture to campus.
Students accepted to the academy, which is free, are joined by 10 North Carolina State students who serve as “near-peer” mentors. During the week, attendees draft their college-admission essays, work with a test-preparation team, and attend classes.
“Having the near-peer model, having our mentors with them all week to talk about their experience and the steps they took to get to a competitive institution like N.C. State, I think that’s really important in having students see themselves in someone,” Chalmers says.
The academy, he says, also serves as an affirmation for students, who must have a cumulative 3.5 GPA or be in the top 10 percent of their class to attend. “Students sometimes don’t have the confidence in themselves, but bringing them to a college campus, having them sit in a college classroom, having them do some writing, it can change that confidence level,” Chalmers says. At the close of the program, “students are in tears talking about how inspiring the event is.”
And it works — academy participants are admitted to North Carolina State at higher rates than those in the general pool. While the program aims to promote general college readiness, it’s also a way for North Carolina State to distinguish itself among other colleges that students may be considering.
Chalmers says that, given the national decline in black student enrollment, colleges across the nation have been placing staff members in North Carolina State’s region — and offering substantial financial-aid packages to lure away students who might have traditionally expected to attend his institution. Enrollment of black students at North Carolina State fell 26.1 percent between 2010 and 2017.
“If, before, we may have been competing with two or three other schools, we may be competing with 10 schools now. There’s a lot of competition in North Carolina specifically for those students,” Chalmers says. “You see that decline” in black-student enrollment. “Well, every school is trying to reverse that decline.”
Competition for black and other minority students is particularly intense for the better-known private nonprofit and public universities, like Amherst and North Carolina State. That’s why Leykia Nulan has engineered a highly-personalized method of reading underrepresented students’ applications.
She and her staff are looking at the files “holistically and moving them through our process in a way that would counterbalance some of the obstacles that these students would face that may not be present for students with, say, a longstanding history of college-going in their family, or a fluency with college culture and the application process, or access to additional test prep or resources at their school,” Nulan says.
Compounding those issues for students interested in Amherst, Nulan says, is the fact that the university recently did away with allowing an undecided major option on the Common Application, which all applicants must use. That means students’ admissibility depends on the first- and second-choice majors they select — and many times, Nulan and her team find, underrepresented students apply to majors they are not competitive in.
So Nulan has developed a “high-touch” process for reviewing applications, in which she or a member of her team might email a student whose academic qualifications don’t meet Amherst’s benchmarks for success in their intended major, and suggest a number of related majors instead.
“Sometimes the students say no. And sometimes they say, ‘Oh, absolutely, sure. Thanks for explaining this to me,’” Nulan says. “So we’re just doing academic advising, essentially, in the college application process.”
That outreach is one way of expanding the pool. Lorelle Espinosa, vice president for research at the American Council on Education, believes institutions need to start working with prospective college students even earlier and play a larger role in getting children ready for college.
“I’d love to see all campuses play a more active role in their communities and in seeing more students get college-ready and ultimately enroll in college, and not do it from a place where they’re trying to create, always, a pipeline to their college, but a pipeline to any college anywhere in the country,” Espinosa says.
“When you think about how K-12 is funded and you think about where the most underresourced schools are located, they’re in these communities that are becoming more and more segregated by class and by race,” she says. “The whole picture here has a lot to do with these systemic barriers and systemic racism that you see from the very beginning of a child’s life all the way to the work force. Like any big problem in society, it turns out to be much more complicated than news headlines or common assumptions would lead you to believe.”
Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle and has worked for MLB.com.
Ruth Hammond contributed data analysis for this article, which introduces the Diversity section of Almanac 2019.