Coleman: Minority enrollment down

“I can tell you that our numbers are down,” Coleman said to a group of 75 people gathered in Detroit for an event hosted by the Michigan Chronicle, the city’s foremost newspaper on black issues.

Though Coleman expressed concern for the declining numbers, she did not provide statistics to support her statement.

The University is expected to officially release demographics for the Class of 2012 by mid-May.

Next year’s freshmen will be the first group admitted to the University since the passage of the 2006 statewide ballot initiative that banned the use of race- and gender-based affirmative action by public institutions in Michigan.

Coleman said the University has been working to improve underrepresented minority enrollment rates since 2006 and she was hopeful the percentages would improve in coming years.

“Our numbers were down after the Supreme Court ruling, and we managed to claw our way back up,” Coleman said in an interview. “If we have to claw our way to the top again, we will.”

The University heightened its minority recruitment efforts in 2003, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled its undergraduate admissions process was unconstitutional in the case of Gratz v. Bollinger.

Minority enrollment numbers dropped in 2004 after the Gratz ruling, but rose the next year to surpass 2003 levels, peaking at more than 13 percent in 2005. After the passage of the race- and gender-based affirmative action ban, minority enrollment dropped to a new five-year low, hitting 10.9 percent in 2007.

The University’s struggle to increase minority enrollment for the 2008 admissions cycle meant a totally revamped application and admissions process this year. Though Coleman said the University has always reviewed applications holistically, she said each application is now read several times before a decision is made.

Coleman said the University began using Descriptor Plus, a service provided by the College Board, to improve minority recruiting efforts across the state. Descriptor Plus sorts student by home address and school location, and then breaks down the demographics of these “clusters” by socioeconomic, educational and racial criteria.

“From this we’re able to go through the state and understand areas where we should be concentrating our message,” Coleman said.

She said University efforts to recruit students have been particularly strong in the cities of Detroit, Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. However, The Michigan Daily reported in December that counselors in the majority of Detroit high schools available to comment said they had seen University recruiters less frequently since the passage of the 2006 ban.

Coleman said the University has taken a “one student at a time” approach to minority recruitment since 2006 and that the fight for diversity would continue into the future.

“We understand that we’re in this for the long run,” Coleman said. “It’s why I come out to meetings like this, and it’s why I make individual phone calls to students once they’re admitted.”

Coleman said she convinced one student from Detroit to enroll after she discovered that the student and his parents, who Coleman said didn’t go to college, misread the acceptance letter that offered him a full scholarship.

Financial aid is an important starting point for improving minority enrollment, Coleman said. She added that the University has collected $70 million in the past 18 months to give financial aid to students like the one she phoned.

Business School junior Britney Little, the financial secretary for the University’s chapter of the historically black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, said she thought the University still needed to do more minority outreach and attributed most successful recruitment efforts to minority organizations on campus, not the University.

“I think there is definitely room for improvement, and that includes going to places outside of Detroit,” Little said. “We talk about diversity, but having students from the same area doesn’t make a diverse campus when they’ve all had the same experience.”