A Diverse Blend: The Recruiting Job

While much of the Asian-American community gears up for the coming social season filled with dances, food fests and midterms, a group of undergraduates is hard at work to insure that the applicants to the class of 1991 will include a diverse blend of Asian-Americans from across the country.

Recruiting trips and phone marathons are keeping the Admissions Committee of the Asian American Association (AAA) busy, as Byerly Hall's search for talented minorities pulls into the homestretch. The AAA members work with representatives from other minority groups on campus under the auspices of the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program (UMRC), through the Admissions Office.

"The program seeks to provide information to potential students who might not consider Harvard as an option," says Jennifer D. Cary '78, who heads minority recruitment programs at Harvard. Since its inception in 1969, the program has played an important role in increasing the number of minority applicants to Harvard, she says.

In 1984, 12.5 percent of all Asian-American applicants were accepted.

In terms of Asian recruitment, the efforts of UMRC are specifically directed toward students with blue-collar backgrounds or towards those whose parents did not go to college, says Cary. "Many of these students think Harvard is an unattainable goal. We bring them the reality that this University is within reach."

Contacting low-income, inner-city Asians, answering their questions about Harvard and encouraging them to apply to Harvard compose the core of the AAA admissions committee's work, says committee co-chairman David H. Eun '89.

"There is a big stereotype about Harvard that it is an all-white, rich and snobby institution that might discourage lower-income Asian-Americans from applying. We just show them that this stereotype is not the true Harvard," he says.

Working with the UMRC, the committee sends its members on several week-long recruiting trips to Asian communities across the country to target talented students of all backgrounds to apply to Harvard.

Cultural education of the admissions officers is another important way in which the undergraduate group helps in the recruitment of Asian-Americans, says Eun.

"We act as middlemen--relaying information to the Admissions Office from the Asian-American community and vice-versa."