A Bidding War?

Harvard's inability to attract more than 95 Black students to enroll in the Class of 1996 reflects a disturbing failure to compete for minority students and faculty. Last April, the Admissions Office admitted roughly the same number of Blacks as in previous years, but there are fewer Black students in the Class of '96 than in any class since 1972. Last year, by comparison, 132 Blacks entered the ranks of first-years.

For a college that at least publicly ranks campus diversity as one of its top admissions priorities, why is it so hard for Harvard to attract minority students? One reason is money. In recent years, schools like Stanford and Duke have begun to woo prospective minority first-years with attractive race-based aid packages.

Many students of all races who are accepted to Harvard face the tough choice of whether to accept full or almost full scholarships from other schools or to pay more (even with a financial aid package) and come to Harvard. In many cases, Harvard's prestige outweighs the extra financial burden. But for many minorities today, the special deals offered else-where inflate the opportunity cost of choosing Harvard to stratospheric levels.

But money isn't the only problem. Colleges such as Morehouse, Spelman and Howard have also increased their enrollments as more and more Black students have chosen these mostly Black schools.

President Neil L. Rudenstine discussed the issue earlier this month at a race relations workshop and suggested that if Harvard's inability to attract Black students persists, Byerly Hall may face no choice but to begin offering its own special scholarships for Black students.

But such a drastic change of policy and principle is at best premature.

Currently Harvard awards financial aid strictly on a need basis, and has entered into an agreement with the other Ivies to keep it that way. Throwing our hat into the bidding war for minority students would not only break that agreement but would create some ethically questionable inequities in Harvard's admissions and financial aid process. What would Harvard say to a blue-collar white kid from Kentucky who received a regular aid package after it awarded a huge race-based deal to a Black kid from Exeter?

Harvard would be taking an important step beyond actively seeking out qualified minorities. And if the College justified the program in terms of correcting past wrongs, it would then mire itself in the logically complicated mud of relative deprivation. Who is really worse off--the disabled white student from a broken home, or the middle class Black student?

One might say this is the perfect argument against any sort of minority recruitment at all. While we see a large distinction between actively recruiting students on one hand and offering them fancy aid packages on the other, we do feel that income-based recruitment in many cases makes as much sense as race-based recruitment.

After all, one of Harvard's worst "diversity" problems lies in the income distribution of its applicant pools. The students who turned down Harvard this year were, for the most part, from middle-income families. And given the racial makeup of low-income areas, encouraging more low-income students to apply would increase the number of minority applicants as well.

With this in mind, we think one solution is to expand pre-application recruitment of minority and low-income students. Admissions officers must visit inner cities more often. It's not as if the Black prospectives who were courted by other schools were the only qualified Blacks in the nation who could have been members of the class of '96. If Harvard cared as much about finding spots for minority and low-income students as it does about finding spots for legacies and athletes, the problem might not be so unwieldy.

Does spending more on minority and low-income recruiting violate equity principles? Not nearly to the same extent as engaging in a race-based bidding war, since including both groups cuts a much larger swath through America's disadvantaged than simply including race does. And making it easier for groups to apply to Harvard should be distinguished from giving individuals large amounts of money to afford Harvard.

We should acknowledge that changing the current admissions process won't solve this problem entirely. After all, other schools have offered race-based packages before, without the same effect on Harvard's first-year pool. And enrollment at mostly Black colleges has been increasing for years. Obviously there are more reasons for the low number of Blacks this year.

One reason is probably the friction on campus among racial and ethnic communities. World of last year's increase in inter-group racial tensions certainly made its way beyond the Square. The cancellation of the minority student pre-frosh weekend last year may have sent the wrong message at the wrong time. And the fact that pre-frosh weekend happened to take place at the height of last spring's problems certainly didn't encourage prospective Black first-years to choose Harvard over another school--a competing institution that not only may have offered a more positive interracial environment, but a fatter scholarship check to boot.

Clearly, Harvard hasn't come up with the right ways to deal with diversity. Improving the climate of race relations on campus would certainly increase the likelihood that more Black and other minority students would choose Harvard.

At present, Harvard's financial aid system is fair. The University offers non-monetary merit scholarships, and it does not give out special monetary awards. If Harvard started giving out race-based scholarships, it would face a much more complicated ethical dilemma.

Fortunately, there are other options we can try for now. Recruiting more minority and low-income students and improving race relations should go a long way toward reversing this year's problem. If it doesn't, we may have to consider special aid packages for minority and low-income students. Including both groups would wipe out much of the ethical problem of pitting competing groups of America's disadvantaged against one another. At this point, however, such a step away from Harvard's current policy isn't warranted.

Still, in the coming months, students and administrators must work hard to insure that more than 95 Black students participate in Orientation Week next fall. We cannot allow a slide into the all-white traditions of Harvard's past.