Are Declines In Minority Enrollment Always A Problem?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article entitled “Public Colleges in Florida and Kentucky Try to Account for Sharp Drops in Black Enrollments,” but the article itself gives the impression that the accounting was pretty successful.

At Kentucky — where the number of black freshmen dropped from 256, or 6 percent of the entering class, to 151, or 4 percent — administrators initially blamed the lower numbers on a slight increase in the minimum ACT score required for admission. They said the university had chosen not to admit students whose borderline test scores suggested they might not be able to compete academically.

That seems to me make sense, but in our age of political correctness the fact that something makes sense doesn’t make it acceptable.

That explanation brought an angry response from several black Kentucky lawmakers, who accused the university of offering poor excuses for its own failure to maintain diversity, and of operating on the offensive assumption that black applicants could not cut it there.

Anyone familiar with the Summers Grovel at Harvard can predict what happened next. University president Lee T. Todd Jr. sought to reassue his critics

by outlining a list of steps that his institution was taking to reverse the enrollment decline. Those included adding three new recruiters, reallocating $500,000 to diversity-related scholarships, and adopting a new “holistic” admissions system that will look beyond an applicants’ grades and test scores.

The Kentucky decline in minority enrollment “comes just one year after its black-freshman enrollment rose by 20 percent, and two years after a 30-percent jump,” but, curiously, president Todd did not shift any funds away from minority recruitment after those succsssful years.

Meanwhile, in Florida minority enrollment in the 11 campus public university system declined by 566 students this year, which reduced the minority percentage from 15.9% to 14.1%. Predictably,

Many of the state’s black leaders have blamed the decline on Gov. Jeb Bush’s 1999 decision to have the university system replace race-conscious admissions with an admissions guarantee for students in the top fifth of their high-school classes.

A closer look, however, reveals the decline may not be a problem in search of a solution, at least not a solution focused on outreach and racial preferences. The “problem,” in short,

would look better if not for the problems plaguing Florida A&M University, a historically black institution. Tarnished by administrative turmoil and a series of financial and athletics scandals, the university took in 578 fewer black freshmen this fall, a 27-percent drop. The total black freshman enrollment for the rest of the system inched upward, from 3,763 to 3,775. Half of those institutions reported increases while the other half reported decreases

Note well: minority enrollment declined by 566 students for the entire 11 campus system, but by 578 students at only one of those campuses, the historically black Florida A&M. But for the decline at Florida A&M, minority enrollment would actually have increased by 12 students.

Since Florida A&M is predominantly black, it is safe to say that the amount of “diversity” in the Florida system did not decline at all. But this should not be surprising: it has always been clear that diversiphiles care more about numbers than “diversity.”

Say What? (2)

  1. Michelle Dulak Thomson October 15, 2005 at 1:00 pm | | Reply

    What to say about Lee Todd Jr’s response, including

    outlining a list of steps that his institution was taking to reverse the enrollment decline. Those included adding three new recruiters, reallocating $500,000 to diversity-related scholarships, and adopting a new “holistic” admissions system that will look beyond an applicants’ grades and test scores.

    The assumption that “looking beyond” grades and scores will necessarily shift the racial mix of the admitted students in the preferred direction has always been to me the most astonishing feature of this controversy. Why on earth should it?

  2. The Colossus of Rhodey October 15, 2005 at 2:25 pm | | Reply

    Diversity conundrum

    We’ve said it before (most recently here), and we’ll say it again: “Diversity” doesn’t equate to any academic benefits, and those who argue loudest for “diversity” never can answer why the supposed “benefit” of their ideology doesn’t apply to HBCs…

Say What?