Alarms sounded at the University of Maryland when the Class of 2022 arrived at College Park. Seven percent of freshmen in fall 2018 were Black, down from 10 percent the year before and 13 percent in 2014.
It marked a nadir for a metric crucial to the flagship university’s commitment to diversity in a state where about a third of public high school graduates each year are Black.
The university’s admissions team resolved to reverse the trend, with urgent outreach to high school seniors who had started applications but not finished them.
“We got on the phone and we called hundreds, hundreds of students,” said Shannon Gundy, executive director of undergraduate admissions. The interventions continued even after admission decisions. Gundy’s team called admitted students to remind them about a campus visit day, to confirm their intent to enroll, and to push them to register for orientation.
It helped. The Black share of freshmen rebounded the next fall to 10 percent.
Yet the episode underscored the enduring disconnect between the racial demographics of many flagship universities, including U-Md., and the population of states they serve.
Fifteen state flagships had at least a 10-point gap between the percentageof Black public high school graduates in their states in 2019 and the Black share of freshmen they enrolled that fall, according to federal data analyzed by The Hechinger Report and The Washington Post.
For U-Md., the gap was 24 points — the sixth-largest in the country. Critics say College Park has a dismal record of recruiting and enrolling a student body that resembles Maryland.
“It’s really just the age-old conversation about waiting for a seat at the table,” said Saba Tshibaka, a senior and organizer with the student group Black Terps Matter. “I want U-Md. to really understand the impact of denying these native Black students from Maryland, but I don’t think that they do.”
College Park, like many flagships, also struggles to recruit Latino students. About 7 percent of its freshmen in 2019 were Latino, compared with nearly 14 percent of Maryland’s public high school graduates.
Flagship universities are among the most prestigious public universities in the country, financed in part by tax dollars, and their missions include providing affordable and high-quality education to residents of their states.
Focused on research and teaching, the schools are typically more selective than other public universities. They recruit heavily in their home states but also around the nation and the world. Getting into them can provide a huge academic and career boost. They tend to have higher graduation rates, and their alumni networks provide powerful economic and political connections.
“Many of the flagships and highly selective public colleges are behaving basically like an Ivy League institution when it comes to admissions,” said Tomás Monarrez, a research associate at The Urban Institute who has analyzed racial representation in higher education. “The issue is not that there aren’t enough qualified Black and Latino students. It’s about who they’re choosing to accept.”
Related: Report finds a drop in Black enrollment at most top public colleges and universities
Black students have long been underrepresented at flagships across the country.
In 2019, federal data show, the Black share of public high school graduates was 17 percent in Michigan, 37 percent in South Carolina and 49 percent in Mississippi. But the Black share of freshmen enrollment that fall was 4percent at the University of Michigan, 6 percent at the University of South Carolina and 10 percent at the University of Mississippi.
The 39-point gap in Mississippi was the largest in the country on this measure of flagship demographics.
“[W]e have progress to make,” University of Mississippi spokesman Rod Guajardo acknowledged in a statement. He said the school is intensifying efforts to recruit and retain African-American students from within the state. He cited a financial aid initiative and a program that invites rising high school seniors to a summer conference on the campus in Oxford, Miss.
As a parent whose children have graduated college and both were high performing students, I found the process of admission to the most competitive schools to be stacked against them. The article uses the standard of graduating in 6 years. Both my children graduated in 4 years and had the equivalent of 5 years of college.
The admission process looks for balance geographically, economically , by ethnicity and by gender. The standardized exams have a higher weighting for English than for Science and Math. The Math portion of the SAT does not distinguish from the truly gifted and the very strong. 52 out of 270 in my children’s graduating class scored 800 on the Math portion of the SAT. The admissions don’t look at US Math Olympiad scores, AP and IB scores in many cases because the results come in after decisions on admittance is made. Their are special math competitions for women because they don’t fare as well relative to men in the open competitions. MIT accepts roughly 3x women applicants as men.
One of my children scored a 35 on the ACT. Scored 5 on every AP exam he took, took courses beyond the AP curriculum such as data structures and multi-variable calculus. He was not accepted at any Ivy league programs. His grades were very strong and he graduated from one of the top public HS in the country, Bergen County Academies, where 15% of the class are National Merit Semi-finalists.
The universities want students to enroll in liberal arts programs where they have greater capacity of professors to teach than in STEM and Finance programs.
I am in favor of providing support for minorities. The problem is there is insufficient capacity in the CS/EE and finance programs. In many cases the minority students don’t have the foundation to be successful and end up changing majors into areas where they can succeed.
The universities could do a number of things to increase enrollment for students such as my children and help underprivileged students. First they could provide the ability to obtain credit for a course not covered by the AP-IB programs by offering an exam equivalent to the final exam in that course. They could charge an administration fee and require a score in the top 20-25% of those who took the course to get credit. This would open up room in these programs. They could require as a condition of admittance, students, such as my children provide tutoring and mentoring to help underprivileged children succeed in areas where their foundation is weak.
It is fundamentally unfair, in my opinion for students who would thrive at the best universities to not receive acceptance to accept those who can’t graduate in the programs I described and are pushed into areas which don’t lead to high paying employment upon graduation, not to mention the extra two years of school necessary to graduate.