Minority Recruitment at Harvard: Still a Ways to Go

HARVARD HAS LONG ADHERED to an admissions policy aimed at producing a diverse student body. Diversity, however, is more than a function of the selection process. Since a student body can only be as diverse as its applicant pool, the Admissions Office actively recruits people from distinctive backgrounds as well as people with special talents in athletics and the arts. As Michelle Green, an admissions officer, says, "If we ever stopped recruiting, we would wind up with an all-white, all-prep, all-brain student body."

In response to racial turmoil in the late sixties, Harvard for the first time decided to include minority students in its concept of diversity. Until then, as Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, recalls, "Diversity at Harvard simply meant an all-white student body." Today, Harvard has a fairly active minority recruitment program, one that supplements the efforts of regular admissions staff members with those of alumni and students. This program reflects the understanding that recruiting minority students requires a different kind of effort from recruiting, say, football players, or students coming from a prep school background.

At the present, however, the number of minority students at Harvard--particularly those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds--remains relatively low (see table), and the question persists, how successful is Harvard in meeting the acknowledged need to recruit these students? While Robert F. Young '74, an admissions officer who coordinates the activities of undergraduate recruiters with the Admissions Office, says the low number of minority students at Harvard is not a reflection on the recruitment program, he adds, "The fact is, the minority applicant pool is not that deep. There just aren't enough talented minority students right now."

Nevertheless, Harvard clearly believes that some disadvantaged minority students--in addition to those who have the benefit of prep and private school educations, or who come from middle and upper class backgrounds--would make "attractive" candidates--in Young's terms--were they to apply to Harvard. Otherwise, the admissions office presumably would not send student recruiters to high schools in low income areas with predominantly minority student bodies. Yet many of these students will not apply, mainly because they expect their low or mediocre grades and test scores to keep them out.

Although grades and test scores do figure in the admissions process, the role of such statistics is limited, and many students unfamiliar with Harvard's admissions policy incorrectly assume that poor scores and grades alone will keep them out of Harvard. As admissions officers note, one of the major purposes of recruiting is to uncover the student who does not realize that he may be "in the ballpark."

The difficulty in recruitment lies in channeling efforts in directions that have a reasonable chance of turning up "ballpark" candidates. Harvard's minority recruitment program utilizes a variety of techniques, but its first step is a selection process, a winnowing out based on Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores.

Harvard receives from Educational Testing Services (ETS) a "Search List" that contains the names of all students who identify themselves as minority members with certain grade averages and SAT scores. The ETS search service enables the individual admissions office to determine the criteria for its own Search List, such as grade averages, college board scores and geographical distribution. Harvard sets its minimum levels at a B-minus grade average and a 900 SAT score. The Admissions Office treats the Search List as a starting point for recruitment, sending letters to all students on its Search List. Oscar Rodriguez '80, one of the student recruiters, says the function of the letters is both "to tell the Search students what Harvard is about, and to try to sell Harvard to them as best we can."

With high schools around the country potentially warranting a recruitment trip, the Admissions Office depends strongly upon the Search Lists to locate potential applicants. As L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid says, "The Search List provides the initial contact. If we didn't use the Search List, we'd have nothing."

Harvard introduced the Search List into its recruitment program two or three years ago, Jewett said.

If the Search List is a preliminary step, Harvard's actual recruitment program has three components--alumni, staff and students--which Jewett describes as being "pretty balanced in importance." Of the three, only the student group works specifically on minority recruitment (although two part-time admissions staff members primarily work with the minority candidate). The alumni and staff efforts in minority recruitment are integrated into the general admissions program.

With respect to the alumni, this means notifying local Harvard Clubs and their members of the Search List names from their areas, and hoping these alums follow up on the list in addition to their other recruiting and interviewing responsibilities. But as Jewett says, "In some areas there's been very active alumni participation, and in other areas, there hasn't been."

The minority recruitment program, as regards the staff members, is also loosely defined. "Each staff person is encouraged to include minority recruiting as one of his responsibilities," Jewett says, adding that the amount of recruiting varies with the locale and the given staff member.

The minority recruitment program may have a random quality because of this division of responsibilities among alumni and staff members. Brad Richardson, a Harvard admissions officer since 1969, says that of the roughly six weeks he spends on the road recruiting each year, he does some minority recruitment work "just about every day. For example, every school in Miami where I recruit has a certain number of blacks and Spanish-speaking people, so you're bound to run into some of those kinds of people there."

But, Richardson continues, he never goes to a school just to recruit minority students. "That's not our purpose. We haven't got time for that," he says.

The places where Harvard does spend its time and money may reveal something about the priorities of the admissions program. Like Richardson, most staff members are on the road between six and eight weeks a year, both to recruit and to conduct interviews. While Jewett says he cannot be precise about the kind of effort that goes into minority recruitment, he does say he has a clear picture of other segments of the applicant pool.

Every fall, for instance, the dean of admissions and about four other staff members travel to Wallingford, Ct., where they spend two days interviewing students at Choate Rosemary Hall. In January, a single staff member returns to Choate Rosemary in order to interview "post graduates" (students who attend prep schools for one year after graduating from other secondary schools) for whom a fall interview would hold limited value. According to Susan Moriarty, a college guidance counselor at Choate Rosemary, the January trip is "essentially for the benefit of the athletic P.G.s [post-graduates]."

According to Richardson, the admissions staff makes comparable visits to about 40 other schools. He estimates that of the roughly 700 "man-days" staff members spend on the road, about 200 are spent on these trips.

Although many eastern colleges court the prep school and private school students, the interest Harvard displays toward them appears to be unusual. Moriarty said that of the hundred-plus colleges that send representatives to Choate Rosemary, Harvard alone provides one-on-one interviews with a staff member for all applicants. "Yale, for example, comes here with several alumni interviewers, but only one man from the admissions staff," Moriarty said.

Moriarty says that Harvard's trip to Choate Rosemary is purely a matter of convenience because "most of our kids who apply are very anxious to check Harvard out, so nearly all of them visit Harvard."

In an interview last week, Jewett explained that the function of Harvard's trips to prep schools is not primarily to recruit, but to provide each applicant the staff interview to which he is entitled. "If you're going to talk about would resources of time and effort, to have a hundred Exeter students making a trip down" is a much greater waste, he said. Harvard does not grant interviews to prep school students when they visit Harvard.

After listening to Moriarty's observation that most prep school seniors do in fact visit Harvard, Jewett provided a different explanation for Harvard's travelling policy: "We can't just automatically fit them all in. They come on the weekends lots of times. We're not going to sit around and interview them on Sundays."

Linden Smith, director of undergraduate admissions at Yale, says she finds Harvard's practice of sending a full team of admissions officers to secondary schools unfeasible. "We can't afford to send a team of admissions officers up to an Exeter or an Andover," Smith said, adding, "We find it much less expensive to interview these students on campus."

EVEN IF MINORITY RECRUITMENT is only a secondary responsibility for most staff members and alums who do admissions work, one element of the recruitment effort--the student recruitment office--exists entirely for the purpose of minority recruitment.

Jewett likes to speak well of this program. When asked where the main thrust of Harvard's minority recruitment effort lies, he responds that, "While the main impetus for recruitment has got to come from staff, students--certainly in the areas they focus on--would probably be at least equal in terms of what they produce.

"Our general feeling has been to incorporate their efforts and use them as best we could," he says, adding, "We clearly wouldn't do it if we did not think they were helpful."

The students say, however, that their effectiveness is severely limited by a lack of support from the Admissions Office. The staff has acted repeatedly in less than a supportive manner, they say.

'Within the budget we've got to deal with, I think we're spending all we could on minority recruitment without cutting into other things I think are equally important.' - L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions

The student recruiters maintain that the Admissions Office does not provide them with the logistical underpinnings necessary for a successful recruitment program. Their budget for the admissions office is barely adequate, they say, and this year it must cover a greater number of expenses than ever before. Last year, for example, the students had complete access to office telephones, but now they must finance most of their calls out of the budget allotted to them.

Another complaint students raise is that the admissions office saddles them with various rules and procedural guidelines amounting to little more than "bureaucratic red tape." One such guideline requires the students to send out letters in the fall to all the minority students on the Search Lists, before they may begin any other form of recruiting. In light of the letter "official Harvard" sends these students, the minority recruiters say their own letter is a duplication of efforts.

The complaint about bureaucratic red tape is not in itself terribly important, but the rules and guidelines they criticize may be indicative of a generally negative attitude among regular admissions officers toward the program. According to Enrique Moreno '78, one of the students who has worked longest in the program, the recruiters "are always at square one with the admissions staff. Harvard has no long-range plans for us. Each year I've been here we've gone knocking on Jewett's door, asking for funds. Each year, we've been getting them, but we are constantly forced to legitimate ourselves, adopting at best a defensive position."

If Bob Young, staff coordinator between the students and the Admissions Office, goes along with no other complaint, he does agree that they are in a tenuous position with respect to the office. In other respects, however, his analysis differs from both that of the students and of Jewett. Young suggests that the performance of the students has been something less than confidence-inspiring. He says that the decision to restrict students' access to the office phones, for example, in part resulted from the high phone bill students ran up the previous year. Most of the calls, Young added, were placed to a single number.

Young goes on to say that the students don't appreciate the need to establish a certain appearance of professionalism. Thus, the other reason for the decision on the phones was something the students viewed at the time as another strip of that bureaucratic red tape. Setting up dates on the phone to recruit at a school looks unprofessional, Young says, adding that he insisted students write the school guidance counselors a letter first, "with a 'cover' letter from the dean, so as to give the students some legitimacy."

When asked about the decision to limit the student recruiters' use of the phones, Jewett was not critical of the students. "We just felt that we could cut back in use of phones throughout the offices," he said, adding, "It is very important to have written records of what appointments are being set up."

In addition, Young said the students do not operate well with alums. The students agree. Many of them said that cooperating with the alums often entails a certain amount of "ass-kissing"--something they are reluctant to do, even for the sake of the recruitment program.

Young says he has also received "lots of complaints from guidance counselors about the ineptitude of student recruiters. One guidance counselor even told me that he wouldn't permit 'incompetent' students to recruit in his school any more."

It may not even be realistic to expect students to run a broad recruiting program. Jean Camper Cahn, dean of Antioch School of Law, says that from her experience with Antioch's minority recruitment program, she believes minority recruitment is a job requiring professional expertise. With minority students making up 30 per cent of the law school's student body, Antioch operates an unusually successful minority recruitment program. "I don't believe that undergraduate students are in the best position to recruit for a college or university. They often lack both the maturity and general knowledge about the institution," she says.

Young shares Cahn's point of view. "It's not really their faults," he says, "but the recruitment program has been run badly because students, not understanding the working of the rest of the office, could not operate effectively."

Young says he devotes considerable time to helping the students gain the knowledge and experience they lack. He follows their activities closely, and when possible, meets with them once a week. To counter the problem of rapid student turnover because of graduation, he hopes to develop a manual on "how the minority recruitment program should proceed out of this office." Young is, himself, only a one-year admissions officer. His work in Harvard's admissions office ends in June.

In view of Dean Jewett's seeming reluctance to discuss areas in which the students are not functioning well and his apparently more favorable impression of the student recruitment program, it would be incorrect to equate Young's willingness to recognize the students' shortcomings and his efforts to improve their performance with an overall approach on the part of the Admissions Office.

Despite the view voiced by some admissions officers that the students provide a valuable contribution to minority recruitment, Young says the overall attitude in the office toward the student recruiters is quite negative. "Every time the key to the Xerox machine disappears, somebody says Those damn students."' This problem is only in part due to the students' performance, Young adds. Another important element is the current political climate with respect to minority rights. "These are very hostile times," he says. "People are seeing blacks under every bed."

UNTIL THE TORRENT of civil rights activities in the late sixties, Harvard had no minority recruitment program at all, and very few minority students. A decade later, with the phrase "reverse discrimination" very much in the air, Young says he is anxious about the kinds of political pressure that led to--and could conceivably put an end to--programs like this one. Indeed, if Young's fears are justified, they could go a long way toward explaining certain otherwise puzzling aspects of the recruitment picture.

"The one thing we really hoped student recruiting would do," Jewett says, "and the thing I still think is most important, is that in communities that are to some degree economically or culturally isolated, students coming from comparable backgrounds may have an initial impact."

Everyone seems to agree that recruiting trips are what the students do best. Yet the Admissions Office's response to student travel seems rather unenthusiastic. A trip to several South Dakota Indian reservations planned by Rodriguez last fall is a case in point. "It took politicking for me to get access to the reservations," Rodriguez says. "The people at the reservations saw me as another flunkie for the whites. At first they told me not to plan on spending the night, because I would be with a white man [Gus Reed, the admissions officer who was to accompany Rodriguez]."

At the last minute, Reed was unable to go. The Admissions Office did not replace him. Instead they cancelled the trip altogether because the reservation was located several hundred miles from the nearest airport, and there was some difficulty concerning students renting cars under Harvard's sponsorship. One of the three reservations this trip was to cover, Pine Ridge, is the second largest reservation in the United States.

However, student recruiters and the admissions staff generally agree that a more serious limitation on minority recruitment trips is funding. Jewett estimates this year's total budget for minority recruitment at somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. And this budget includes not only student travelling and operating costs, but any minority recruitment trips staff members occasionally take. This budget figure--less than 1 per cent of the Admissions Office's total budget--takes on more meaning when viewed in relation to the kind of money Harvard spends on other areas of recruitment. The Athletic Department, for example, will spend up to $10,000 this winter specifically on football recruitment. According to John P. Reardon '60, director of Athletics, the scope of this program will be limited to four states where alumni efforts have thus far proved insufficient. This program only supplements the various other ways in which Harvard recruits athletes, such as the Admissions Office's January return trips to prep schools.

Jewett's policy toward minority recruiting clearly differs with that of Reardon on football recruitment. The $10,000 to $15,000 Jewett allocates to minority recruitment must go for considerably more than travel to four states. Nevertheless, Jewett terms the minority recruitment effort a "realistic" one, adding, "Within the budget we've got to deal with, I think we're spending all we could on minority recruitment without cutting into other things I think are equally important."

Moreover, he says, "I'm not sure that if we doubled the amount of our staff travelling we would double the effectiveness. I think you reach a point of diminishing returns."

Has Harvard admissions in fact reached that point, or is there perhaps a tendency to slack off too easily? Jewett says, for example, he would like to get a Spanish-speaking person on the staff, one who "understands and can be a source of advice, intuition and experience about that community. Therefore, I want a person who will be a good admissions person, who comes from that background." He says there have not been a lot of good candidates.

This statement, like the claim that the minority applicant pools are shallow at present, is difficult to evaluate directly. Only by examining the effort that goes into recruitment, and the results of that effort, can one begin to assess the Admissions Office's degree of commitment to minority recruitment.

The results do not reflect a successful minority recruitment program. Of the 124 black students in the Class of 1981, for example, Jewett says that most come from middle-class backgrounds. More importantly, as Jewett points out, "the applicant pool, even with respect to minority applicants, tends in background to come from middle-class communities."

Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor of Law and an expert on affirmative action who authored an amicus curiae brief for University of California Regents vs. Allan Bakke, says he is critical of Harvard for preferring advantaged minority students over the disadvantaged. "I do think there's a pool of disadvantaged students out there," he says, adding that "if these admissions people would only get off their butts, they would find a different result."