College 'road map' for minorities

Aaron Wiley knows he sticks out.

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.

The U. senior is one of only about 200 black students at the university, which has an overall minority enrollment of only about 10.5 percent of its 28,600 students.

"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.

Leaders in Utah's System of Higher Education are trying to get that road map to Utah's minority students, asking each of the nine state schools to look at their minority enrollments and report on exactly how they plan to improve them. Currently, the system has about 8.5 percent reported minority students, with Pacific Islander students coming in at the lowest numbers with only about 660 students out of the system's 144,000.

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.