Reprint from The Daily Cardinal, April 8, 1999
Why are more targeted minorities, particularly African-Americans, not enrolled at UW-Madison?
Students, faculty and campus administrators regularly lament the absence of large numbers of minority students on campus. They argue that increased presence of minorities would enrich the education offered at UW-Madison, that the campus lags behind other Big Ten campuses in its minority enrollment and more resources, and that greater effort must be devoted to minority recruitment and retention.
What diversity proponents fail to recognize is how few of Wisconsin’s targeted minority high-school graduates qualify for admission to UW-Madison. The focus is on African-Americans, but the story is much the same for Native Americans, Hispanics and, to a lesser degree, Southeast Asians.
The arithmetic is as compelling as it is discouraging. Consider the 2,286 African-Americans who graduated from the state’s public high schools in 1996-97.
How many met UW-Madison’s minimum requirements for admission, which include graduating in the upper half of the high-school class, completing the appropriate number of college preparatory courses and supplying ACT scores? The 2,264 figure quickly dwindles to 552, which is a 75 percent decline. Why? Less than half the African-American high-school graduates took the ACT, less than 75 percent of those who took the ACT test ranked in the top half of their high-school class, and only three-quarters of them completed the necessary core academic courses in high school.
To be admitted to UW-Madison as a nontargeted applicant (i.e., a white or an Asian-American), meeting the minimum requirements is not enough. Ranking in the upper quarter of one’s high-school class is almost essential to gain admission. Applying this standard reduces the number of African-Americans by another 40 percent, to 321 for the entire state.
With the intense competition for admission to UW-Madison and the use of both academic performance in high school and ACT scores to predict likely success of applicants as college freshmen, the effective standard requires applicants to place in the upper quarter of their high-school class and receive an ACT score of 21 or higher. This leaves a mere 160, or only 7 percent, of Wisconsin’s African-American high-school graduates who would qualify for admission to UW-Madison using the criteria applied to nontargeted applicants.
If every one of these academically talented African-Americans enrolled here, the African-American presence on campus would greatly increase. However, they do not. Meanwhile, the number who would qualify under our policy of preferential admission for African-Americans is probably nearer the 552 figure. So why are more of these students not applying and enrolling here?
Many reasons can be advanced. Most important, there is intense competition among colleges to enroll African-Americans. The most academically talented are wooed by elite private colleges that can offer them generous financial aid and substantial academic support. Others elect to attend institutions near their homes. Some prefer to attend one of the state’s private institutions such as Marquette or Lawrence universities. Some want to attend historically black colleges because of their more nurturing atmosphere, and so on.
Many, no doubt, prefer not to attend UW-Madison — often for particular reasons: its demanding academic standards, its inadequate financial aid, its large and impersonal atmosphere, its small enrollment of African-Americans and its “hostile campus climate.”
Unfortunately, the importance of these considerations in explaining why more of Wisconsin’s African-American high-school graduates do not enroll here simply cannot be answered.
What are the prospects for increasing African-American freshman-enrollment levels? Not very good.
Competition among colleges to enroll African-Americans continues to be intense and shows no signs of lessening. African-American students, like other students, will choose their colleges on the basis of factors over which institutions have little or no control. Finally, this institution is already doing well in enrolling those African-American applicants who are admitted. For example, the percentages of those African-American, white and targeted minority applicants who are both admitted and enrolled at UW-Madison are virtually identical. How much more can be done is not apparent.
Three sobering lessons can be drawn from this analysis. First, the number of African-Americans graduating from Wisconsin’s public high schools who qualify for admission to UW-Madison is limited and will remain so until the kindergarten through high school academic performance of African-Americans improves substantially.
Second, admitting African-Americans who are not academically competitive may push up the number of African-Americans enrolled here but is certain to lower both retention and graduation rates.
Third, because of the state’s relatively small African-American population, proponents of diversity must recognize that the minority presence on this campus cannot, within the foreseeable future, be as large as they might like it to be.