From Deseret News archives:
College 'road map' for minorities
Access, participation, completion targeted
He can feel it when he walks around the University of Utah campus. He can feel it as he sits surrounded by white students in all of his classes.
"When you're the only black person in your class, it does bring up certain social issues," said Wiley, who heads the school's black student union. "I've seen students drop out of class because the class only looks at things from the Anglo view. I've known students who have left the university because there's not enough extracurricular activities about our heritage."
And while Wiley said he's trying to get his black peers to stay on campus through graduation, it's a goal he's not going to be able to accomplish on his own. Advisers, social groups and increased recruitment in middle school are all part of the picture, he said.
"If you don't have anybody to say, 'Here's a road map,' then it's just somebody going in there by themselves and just stabbing away," he said.
The statewide effort is part of a system of higher-education task force on minority and disadvantaged students that hopes to address access, participation and completion through several different initiatives. One of those ideas is to put an administrator for minority enrollment at each university.
At the U., leaders have made minority recruitment a top strategic directive for the next 20 years, said Paul Brinkman, vice president of budgeting. With programs reaching into low-income neighborhoods to get students on the right path to college earlier, Brinkman said the school is trying to tap in to Utah's minority population.
The U.'s ethnic minority population has gone up in the past 10 to 20 years, Brinkman pointed out, from about 5 percent in 1980 to its current standing at 10.5 percent. Still, he said, the school has a long way to go. "It's a broader picture than the university can just turn on the tap. It isn't that simple who is in the pipeline?" he said.
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