For
a high-school student making the rounds of potential colleges,
the treatment doesn't get much more royal than this:
A seven-day, all-expenses-paid trip to campus during the summer.
Tickets to a professional production of Shakespeare one night,
a pizza party the next, a banquet the night after that. A guided
tour of the football stadium, a bowling outing. Meetings and discussions
with officers and distinguished professors. Advice on career choices
and financial aid, even pointers on how to write a winning personal
statement to go with your college application.
An old story, right? Prized athletes being dined, if not wined,
by eager-to-impress college coaches. But it's unlikely anyone
in the group of high school students that strolled into the Hesburgh
Center for International Studies on a perfect July morning last
summer will ever emerge from the tunnel at Notre Dame Stadium
wearing golden headgear.
The 40 male and female students -- all African Americans, all
high school seniors this fall -- were on campus to attend the
annual African-American Catholic Leadership Development Seminar.
Though the title sounds like something where scholarly papers
are exchanged, the program is actually a recruitment tool of the
Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
In recent years Notre Dame has stepped up its efforts to get
more of the nation's brightest and most accomplished black high
school students to consider enrolling here. No specific goal exists
as to how much of the undergraduate student body the University's
officers would like to be made up of African Americans, but the
current 5 percent is deemed insufficient.
Participants in the leadership seminar are considered doubly
attractive because they're also Catholic. As part of a commitment
to preserve the University's "Catholic character," the officers
have decided they want Catholics to continue to constitute 80-some
percent of undergraduates (this year's freshman class is 83 percent
Catholic), irrespective of any gains in racial diversity. From
an admissions standpoint, enrolling black students who are also
Catholic fulfills two institutional dictates with one acceptance
letter.
Leaving perhaps a dozen others to fret over.
At Notre Dame, as at many other highly selective colleges and
universities, the admissions process has become less a struggle
to attract students capable of earning degrees -- about 80 percent
of today's applicants could be successful academically, says Daniel
Saracino '69, '75M.A., Notre Dame's assistant provost for enrollment
-- and more about balancing institutional desires. For example:
Notre Dame wants to enroll better and better qualified students
every year, as measured by standardized test scores, grade-point
averages and the like. These are the people, one could argue,
who have the best potential to change the world for the better.
But the University doesn't want to risk losing critical future
donations from well-heeled benefactors by not accepting their
children if the offspring are competitive academically. The University's
fund-raising operation remains in contact with the admissions
office and alerts it to families of applicants that have been
or have the potential to become strong financial supporters of
the University.
A similar situation exists with Notre Dame employees who have
children. Some employees pass up potentially higher salaries outside
of academe to remain at the University because they expect that
when their children are old enough for college they'll go to Notre
Dame -- for free. The University offers free tuition (but not
free room and board) for dependent children of veteran employees.
But the child has to get admitted first.
Notre Dame also wants to remain true to its heritage of being
a stepping stone to a better life for first-generation college
goers and others of modest means. And it wants to reshape the
student body to be more ethnically and racially diverse and include
more international students. The belief is that students learn
more, in and out of the classroom, if they're thrown together
with people from different backgrounds than their own.
But the University also wants to satisfy the desire of many
of its alumni -- an overwhelmingly Caucasian and homogenous group
-- to see their children follow in their footsteps. Accepting
legacy students has the added benefit in that second-, third-
or whatever generation Domers typically arrive already passionate
about the place.
Then there's Notre Dame's longstanding commitment to fielding
football and other athletic teams capable of competing for national
titles and TV ratings. Championship-caliber teams enliven the
atmosphere of campus, sometimes generate revenues to underwrite
the educational enterprise, and enhance name recognition for the
institution. Scholarship athletes constitute about 9 percent of
each freshman class.
It's true that the best athletes are not always the best scholars.
But when it comes to relaxing admissions standards to accommodate
applicants with special non-academic abilities, Saracino points
out that Notre Dame sometimes gives special consideration to,
say, a cellist who struggled in high school calculus but can saw
through Grieg's "Holberg Suite" like Yo-Yo Ma. Especially if the
University orchestra is in need of cellists.
All this means that admissions has become a huge and complicated
balancing act. Notre Dame won't admit any applicant -- whether
a blue-chip quarterback or the heir to a software empire -- if
the student's academic record suggests he or she can't handle
the University's course work. Nothing would be gained for either
party if the student flunked out. But with hordes of capable applicants
knocking hopefully on the doors of elite colleges and universities,
the institutions find themselves in an enviable position.
As Saracino tells parents, the situation facing most students
who apply to elite schools today is not whether they can do the
work -- they tend not to apply to places obviously out of their
league -- but what the school is looking for this year.
Whether schools can show a preference for certain races or ethnicities
was decided earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. By a
5-4 vote the court said colleges and universities can consider
race and ethnicity as part of a holistic, individualized review
of each applicant's file. The vote affirmed the admissions policy
of the University of Michigan Law School, which said it screens
candidates that way. At the same time, in a 6-3 vote, the court
struck down the affirmative action system of Michigan's undergraduate
admissions office, which automatically awarded under-represented
minorities bonus points that ensured admission to most.
Notre Dame filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Michigan's
point-based system even though its own undergraduate admissions
policies are more like the Michigan law school's. So the rulings
have had no effect on Notre Dame's undergraduate admissions policies.
The same goes for the Notre Dame Law School, MBA program and
the Graduate School, which includes the master's and doctoral
programs in such fields as engineering, science, political science
and English. According to admissions officers in each of the post-baccalaureate
areas, race is one of many factors they take into account as they
sort through applications. Others include the applicant's score
on graduate-school aptitude tests like the LSAT and GRE.
Often the decisive factor with graduate school admission isn't
race, the admissions officers say, but considerations like the
applicant's career plans or -- especially in the case of the Graduate
School -- whether the student's research interests line up with
anyone on the faculty.
The Graduate School does offer nine competitive fellowships
for qualified minority students. But these are add-ons to departmental
budgets. They reward the department for recruiting qualified minorities
but don't take away any slots from non-minorities.
Political conservatives and others have long opposed preferential
admissions treatment based on race, calling it unfair reverse
discrimination. In his dissent to the Michigan law school decision,
Clarence Thomas, the only black Supreme Court justice, quoted
black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who in 1865 told a Boston
audience, "If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him
fall also."
When retired anesthesiologist Paul Witkowski '65, who is white,
read about the University having filed a friend-of-the-court brief
in support of Michigan's affirmative action policies, he wrote
to Saracino to say he was disappointed in Notre Dame.
"Any form of affirmative action to achieve racial diversity
results in rejecting some deserving students because they are
white," the alumnus, who is also the father of a graduate, argued.
He said he had no problem with scholarship athletes receiving
special consideration in admissions because they had worked at
perfecting their physical skills. But racial preference rewarded
"incidental facts of birth."
As part of their deliberations, the Supreme Court justices examined
the reasons schools give for wanting to admit larger numbers of
racial and ethnic minorities. In previous decisions the court
recognized the legitimacy of affirmative action to remedy the
effects of past discrimination. It now validated the notion that
having a more diverse student body could be in a college's own
self-interest. If students really do learn more from being around
people of different backgrounds, then the more-diversified campus
can say it offers a better product.
Many educators also argue that in the future society forecasted
by demographers -- more global and less dominated by Caucasians,
at least numerically -- leaders will have to reflect the rest
of society if they hope to be seen as having any legitimacy. That's
the reason many military leaders and heads of some of the nation's
best-known companies give for supporting affirmative action and
why many filed friend-of-the-court briefs to that effect in the
Michigan case.
Even the Bush administration, which joined in the suits against
Michigan, acknowledged the logic of this argument. After the verdicts
were announced, the president said the court had sought "a careful
balance between the goal of campus diversity and the fundamental
principle of equal treatment under law."
One of the off-campus activities for participants in this past
summer's Catholic leadership seminar was a tour of the Notre Dame-sponsored
Robinson Community Learning Center. Notre Dame students volunteer
as tutors at the center, a former Goodwill store at the corner
of Eddy Street and Corby Boulevard. As he tailed a group of about
20 of the seminar participants snaking their way through meeting
rooms and computer labs, political science professor George Lopez,
one of the directors of the seminar, was asked why it was so important
for Notre Dame to recruit more minorities.
He said, "I can't keep going into a discussion group to talk
about the civil rights movement and international nonviolence
and Martin Luther King and be looking only at white faces."
Lopez, director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International
Peace Studies at Notre Dame, also said, "Teaching international
relations to just upper-middle-class white kids doesn't work either."
For their part, seminar participants seemed largely unaware
of any controversy over race- or ethnicity-based preferences in
college admissions.
"I think it's nice they (Notre Dame) recognize the need for
diversity," said Anna Mazig of Minneapolis, who was considering
Loyola University, Stanford and possibly Harvard or Yale along
with Notre Dame. "When you're in the real world you're going to
be dealing with all different cultures. The real world isn't all
white, it isn't all black, it isn't all anything."
Each year after admissions decisions are mailed out, Saracino's
office fields calls from parents of children not admitted. Some
suspect their child was a victim of reverse discrimination.
"We had a student with a 1370 SAT who was fifth in her class,"
Saracino recalls. "Her father asks, 'If she was black, would she
have been admitted?' Frankly, yes. But she would also have been
admitted if she were an athlete or the child of an alumnus."
The admissions chief's point is that affirmative action has
existed in college admissions as long as colleges have. The first
group to benefit was children of politicians and benefactors,
then alumni children, athletes and promising artists. He wonders
why so many people want to outlaw preferences for under-represented
races and ethnicities when these groups have enjoyed special consideration
only since race-based affirmative action began in 1965.
Saracino explains that Notre Dame's outreach is about more than
gaining the perceived educational benefits of having a more diverse
campus. The effort also reflects what he describes as "our responsibility
as a school within a faith tradition to respond to groups that
have been historically marginalized in the educational process."
Saracino also imagines that in the future, affirmative action
may focus more on socioeconomic factors than race. Evidence suggests
it may be time to start.
The September issue of The Atlantic Monthly reported
on a study by the Century Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
policy research group, that found that 74 percent of students
at the country's 146 most selective colleges came from the most
privileged 25 percent of the U.S. population. Blacks and Hispanics
were under-represented, too, at 12 percent. But only 3 percent
of all students came from the bottom fourth of the socio-economic
scale. The magazine said the findings raise the possibility that
"middle- and upper-income students from minority groups could
be benefitting from affirmative action at the expense of poorer,
more disadvantaged whites."
Fortunately for Notre Dame's admissions office, most alumni
appear to support its approaches to engineering the student body.
Charles F. "Chuck" Lennon, Jr. '61, '62M.A., associate vice president
in charge of alumni relations, said alumni generally don't complain
to him about preferences given to racial and ethnic minorities
in admissions, and they support preferences for legacy students
and talented athletes.
In surveys, graduating seniors also consistently say they wished
the student body were more diverse, Saracino says.
Even Witkowski refuses to criticize the judgment of the school's
officers, saying, "I know Notre Dame always tries to do the right
thing."
To those who insist admissions should be done strictly "by the
numbers," taking into consideration only supposedly objective
measurements like standardized test scores, Saracino says Notre
Dame wouldn't be Notre Dame if that were the case. Fewer children
of alumni would be admitted (Notre Dame's share of legacies, 23
percent, is the highest among elite universities). The same would
be true of employees' children, and far fewer athletes would make
the cut.
"They (the student body) would be academically bright but not
competitive athletically, and it would not be a really exciting
place," he says.
In terms of diversity -- and by almost any recruiting measure
-- the admissions office is coming off its most successful year
ever. The percentage of ethnic and racial minorities enrolled
this fall rose to 21 percent from 16 percent the previous year.
However, the University has a long way to go to catch up with
other elite universities that say they value diversity. At Stanford,
for instance, racial and ethnic minorities make up 50 percent
of the student body, Saracino says. (The category of minorities
includes Asian Americans, who traditionally have not been plentiful
among Notre Dame undergrads but are well represented on West Coast
campuses.) Another reason for Notre Dame's lack of diversity relative
to other places, Saracino notes, is the University's faith tradition.
Notre Dame has always been dominated by Catholics, and most Catholics
in the United States, other than Latinos, are white.
Saracino says he knows firsthand the benefits of diversity.
A Caucasian born in Detroit, he later lived in South Bend and
various places in California. His freshman-year roommate at Notre
Dame turned out to be an ebony-skinned youth from Aruba who spoke
English with a British accent (his native tongue was Papiamento).
Living with someone whose background was so different from his
own was a revelation, the admissions director says.
Saracino also recalls how, during his senior year, at the height
of the student protests against the Vietnam War, the head of the
Army ROTC unit lived across the hall with a conscientious objector.
More recently he came to know an African-American woman student
who was prickly on the subject of race relations and associated
almost exclusively with other black students. When she went on
a study abroad program to Australia she ended up making friends
with many of the white Notre Dame students. The participants were
brought closer through a shared sense of kinship, all of them
being together in a foreign land.
"College should not be a comfortable four years," he says. "College
should be an exhausting, exhilarating, challenging, demanding
four years."
Given the task of balancing competing imperatives, that pretty
much describes the environment in admissions every year.
* * *
(Autumn 2003)
