Adding Color

Past Imperfect

The Climate Today

CRE and Curricular Initiatives

Student Recruitment

Affirmative Action

Office of Multicultural Affairs

What's Next

Student Recruitment

While it’s certainly possible that Ithaca may not be to the taste of some urban students, Larry Metzger, dean of enrollment planning, believes that, if given the chance to visit Ithaca College and its environs, many urban students would find it to be an excellent fit. To that end, the College helps to sponsor annual bus tours, bringing 200–300 students of color from urban high schools or youth organizations to the campus.

For students of color who have applied and been accepted but have not yet decided to enroll, the College has, for many years, offered the Inside Look program, in which the students can visit the campus, at the institution’s expense, for a sampling of IC life. Of the 60–75 students who typically participate in the program, 62–65 percent end up matriculating at Ithaca.

And when the students are not able to come to Ithaca, the College is now going to them through a variety of outreach programs. While the Office of Admission has long canvassed inner-city schools for applicants of color via mailings and contact with high school counselors, the yield from these types of campaigns has typically been low. For the past few years the admission office has been pursuing more personal contact, sending staff to speak to counselors and students at urban high schools and attending specialized college fairs. They also visit agencies throughout the East Coast that work with underrepresented students, such as the Spanish Action League, the Native American Resource Program, and the Minority Apprenticeship Program of Philadelphia.

Apart from the challenges of location and institutional competition, the College is also battling the chicken-or-the-egg effect: Students of color are reluctant to enroll at Ithaca College because of its small population of students of color. Or, for that matter, faculty of color. To ask an African American student from the Bronx to leave his or her familiar surroundings and travel upstate to live in a predominantly white environment for the next four years is a tough sell. To help mitigate this, the admission office has a long-standing program in which IC students of color act as "multicultural ambassadors," hosting prospective freshmen for overnight visits, showing them the campus and taking them to classes and campus activities. Peer recruitment, in the form of current students returning to their high schools or area high schools and speaking to students about Ithaca College, is also encouraged. Vélez-Guadalupe suggests that the College would be prudent to utilize its faculty of color in recruitment, too. Sending a Latino faculty member, for example, to speak to a predominantly Latino high school might have a positive impact on its students.

To help further the efforts to attract student achievers of color, the College last year established the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar Program, a merit-based scholarship administered by the Office of Multicultural Affairs for ALANA students who are ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class and have SAT scores of 1200 or above. Recipients receive $12,000 a year, with additional need-based funds available up to full tuition, and are required to maintain a 3.3 GPA, complete 30 hours of community service each semester and implement a service learning project, and participate in a number of seminars and campus activities.

Another promising development in the area of student recruitment has grown out of the institution’s partnership with the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem (see "President’s Corner," page 2). Although student recruitment is not a stated objective of the partnership, the close, mutually beneficial relationship has led to the matriculation of several of the academy’s students each year. This year there were 16 applicants from the academy; three will be attending IC in the fall.

"There are some kids [from the Frederick Douglass Academy] who have never been out of Harlem," says Metzger. "The objective of their visits to IC isn’t to get them to apply to IC but to see what life is like outside of the city and familiarize themselves with other options. It’s fair to say that of the 16 students who applied to us, the majority would not have even considered going to a college outside the city without having had the experience of coming to Ithaca."

Building contacts and establishing trust, Metzger realizes, are a slow business that generally pays off by increments. But the admission office is resolved to continue to make direct connections with inner-city schools and organizations and to establish IC’s reputation as an institution where students of color are both welcomed and valued.