Heed the Yield Sign

Although Harvard continues to grapple with the challenges of fostering a diverse and inclusive campus community, it has now lost a distinction it had held for 20 years—being the nation’s leader in attracting admitted black students.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, in its annual survey of the enrollment of black first-years at top-tier colleges, recently reported a drop in Harvard’s yield, the percentage of students who accept the offer to enroll. For the class of 2006, only 61.2 percent of admitted black applicants decided to attend Harvard, as opposed to 63.8 last year, as reported in the Boston Globe. In absolute terms, there are six fewer black students in this year’s first-year class than last year. While this year’s drop will not lead to a profound shift in Harvard’s demographic profile, the black student yield should be viewed in comparison to the 79 percent yield that Harvard has among the aggregate student population.

Harvard is losing ground in its effort to attract blacks. The University’s highest yield for black students, 74.1 percent, came in 1996 and has been declining ever since. This disturbing statistic shows that while our black student yield has been strong compared to other Ivy League colleges, Harvard has been suffering as other colleges have stepped up their recruitment efforts. As a consequence, Harvard has for the first time in 20 years been surpassed by Stanford University, which has a black student yield of 64.4 percent this year.

Over the last 10 years, Harvard has experienced an overall drop of 24.4 percent in the number of black students enrolling at Harvard, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found. This year Yale, Brown, Princeton, Brown and Columbia all have admitted larger percentages of black students to their first-year classes than Harvard. As Harvard considers its strategies for combating this downward trend and competes with these other top-tier schools for students who will continue its commitment to diversity, it should look to emulate the strategies employed by other schools to attract minority candidates.

One clear first step seems to be increasing support for the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program. Based out of Byerly Hall, this program subsidizes high school visits by current Harvard minority undergraduates. Students criss-cross the schools in their assigned areas to promote Harvard to talented students of various racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. This program should be expanded so that more undergraduates can visit more schools, and it should be given the advertising capacity to recruit more student presenters from among the undergraduate minority population.

It is encouraging that the admissions office seems to understand the need to address this problem and has begun to take steps to address it, such as its recent move to increase the diversity among campus tour guides. But the steady decline in yield rates for the past decade must be a rallying point around which strategies for better marketing of Harvard’s inclusive community must be developed by the admissions office. This should serve as a wake-up call for the administration to reevaluate its strategy of creating the community the admissions office is seeking to market.