Diversity: More than Simple Numbers
Professor of sociology and civil rights champion Chandler Davidson came to Rice in 1966, the same year that the university’s first two black graduates matriculated. He knew one of them—Linda Faye Williams ’70—well throughout her life, and he recalls a talk she gave several years ago to the Black Student Association.
“She had a lot of very good things to say about Rice,” Davidson says, “but also things about her loneliness and being a little speck of black in a sea of whiteness.”
The first black students at Rice were considered a curiosity, and sometimes they were treated in thoughtless ways. “Linda was a very strong person, a very outgoing and very helping person,” Davidson says. “But her roommate told me Linda would sometimes go into her closet in their room, close the door and just cry. So it was extremely stressful.”
Thanks to the efforts of Davidson, English professor Alan Grob and others who formed a minority student recruitment committee, the number of black students at Rice began to increase through the 1960s and into the ’70s, though progress came slowly.
“There is a feeling in the African-American community that Rice is an elite bastion of white folks that suffers African-Americans to come here rather than actively recruits them,” Davidson says. “It isn’t true. We really do the best we can to get African-American students who can succeed at Rice. But it was difficult in the past just getting peoples’ attention.”
Dispelling the Myth
Headway was made in the 1980s under Richard Stabel, then dean of admission.
“Dean Stabel was really committed to diversifying the student body,” says Catherine Clack, who worked in the Admission Office at that time and currently serves as assistant dean of students and director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs. “Overall, I can’t help but be impressed with the way things are evolving.”
“Rice has made great strides,” agrees David Medina, director of Minority Community Affairs. “We’re not where we want to be yet, but we’re working toward it. Rice is very active in the community—much more than the other universities in Houston—and we’re slowly dispelling the myth that Rice is a school for rich white kids.”
Approximately 44 percent of undergraduates entering Rice in fall 2006 were U.S. students of color, up from 34 percent in fall 2004. Most of the gains were among Hispanic and Asian students, with only 38 black students enrolled in 2006, compared with 50 in 2005 and 51 in 2004. However, that decrease appears to have been an anomaly as 48 black students have enrolled already for 2007–08. But Chris Muñoz, vice president for enrollment, is keeping an eye on the situation.
“We need to watch drops like that,” Muñoz says. “Typically, when your yield goes down, it’s among students you ordinarily haven’t cultivated before. There are students who know that if they can get into Rice, they’re coming here, and often that’s related to a kind of tradition or family history. But when you talk to a group of students who see Rice as just one of a number of very good choices, you don’t have that kind of initial commitment. We have to persuade them Rice is the right choice. If we do our job well, I think a higher proportion of these students will enroll.”
A Targeted Approach
Muñoz successfully increased minority enrollment at other institutions, and he has a strategy for doing the same at Rice. “We need to begin by behaving in a way that shows African-Americans that we want them to be part of our community, that they are essential for us to become a better university,” he says. “We also have to make the case to African-Americans that Rice has something special, and the benefits for any undergraduate who attends Rice are clear: It provides a competitive advantage in helping them achieve their goals, and it gives them an economic advantage. And often, because of their intelligence and energy, our graduates become leaders in their fields.”
Muñoz proposes a two-pronged approach, both beginning in Rice’s own backyard. “First,” he says, “we need to create partnerships with influential leaders in Houston’s African-American communities, such as teachers and high school counselors, deacons and ministers, business people and others who are in contact with able, reasonably well-prepared students who can be successful at Rice.”
Medina has organized several meetings between African-American leaders in the greater Houston area and university officials. “At these, President Leebron has acknowledged our past of exclusion,” Muñoz says. “That was very valuable, because it is absolutely true and there’s no point in saying otherwise. But it’s also an important step in moving forward.”
The second avenue of approach, Muñoz says, is to identify high schools in the greater Houston area that have promising students able to succeed at Rice. “We now have access to data that tell us the number of students who are attending a high school, their demographic distribution, SAT distribution, academic interests and other information such as their extracurricular activities and civic participation,” Muñoz says. “All this helps us know where to target our efforts.”
Most of the targeted schools will be in Harris and surrounding counties. “We have to make sure we do our due diligence in identifying all students,” Muñoz says, “but particularly African-American students in our own neighborhoods.”
The Perfect Storm
Partnerships with community leaders and targeted schools are key to Muñoz’s efforts. “Building partnerships created with advice and counsel from all interested parties will demonstrate that Rice is behaving differently,” he says. And the reasons for behaving differently and for becoming intentional in pursuing students of high caliber wherever they can be found are clear and compelling. Most troublesome—not just for Rice, but for other highly selective universities—is demographic data that indicate the future will see a reduction in the number of students who fit Rice’s academic profile.
“The high school graduation rate is about to decline,” Muñoz says, “and what is underneath that is alarming. I call it ‘the perfect storm.’ Most high school graduates are going to be among groups of students who traditionally have not gone on to higher education, much less a university with the requirements of Rice. We’re going to have, in essence, students of higher income with higher levels of academic preparation being replaced by students from lower incomes and lower academic preparation.”
Of the nearly 1.4 million students who took the SAT last year, for example, only about 10 percent had scores of 1300 or higher. At the 25th percentile, Rice’s SAT scores among the entering class is 1350, and at the 75th percentile, it’s 1550, making 1300 the lower end.
“This is going to be an extremely competitive period for highly selective universities,” Muñoz says. “My view is that the number of students who fit the category of highly selective universities is going to dwindle. And there are all these great universities competing for students from that diminishing pool. Seeking the best students from targeted groups that traditionally have been underrepresented is not only the right thing to do in terms of diversity and equal opportunity and all those things but also from a business standpoint in this hypercompetitive environment.”
Openness, deliberate effort and honest dialogue are the key ingredients in everybody’s recipe for Rice’s success with regard to diversity, especially in increasing the percentage of African-American students. “President Leebron has made it very clear,” Muñoz says, “that it’s one of his priorities for us in enrollment.”
