CUNY Seeing Fewer Blacks at Top Schools

New York Times

Education


CUNY Seeing Fewer Blacks at Top Schools

By KAREN W. ARENSON
Published: August 10, 2006

The enrollment of black students at three of the most prestigious colleges of the City University of New York has dropped significantly in the six years since the university imposed tougher admissions policies.

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Graphic: Examining Enrollment

One of the sharp declines has come at the City College of New York, CUNY’s flagship campus, in Harlem, which was at the center of bitter open admissions battles in the late 1960’s. Black students, who accounted for 40 percent of City College’s undergraduates as recently as 1999, now make up about 30 percent of the student body there, figures provided by the university show.

At Hunter, a competitive liberal arts campus on the East Side of Manhattan, the share of black students fell to 15 percent last year from 20 percent in 1999. And at Baruch, a campus that specializes in business, the proportion of black students slipped to 14 percent from 24 percent. Over all, the number of black undergraduates at CUNY, including those in associate’s degree programs, grew to 57,791 last year from 52,937 in 1999, the figures show.

University officials attributed the declines to several factors, from their admissions policies to greater competition for top minority students from other colleges to students’ own preferences about where they want to study. But Robert Bruce Slater, the managing editor of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which noted the trend at CUNY in its Weekly Bulletin last week, said, “The tougher admissions policy seems to have had a major impact.”

CUNY is not the only public university experiencing such changes. In California, which voted to end affirmative action at its public universities a decade ago, U.C.L.A. and Berkeley have both seen steep declines in the number of black students, even as the numbers at other campuses fell less and have recovered more over time.
CUNY put its tougher admissions policies in place in 2000 and 2001.

Critics like former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said CUNY had low standards and was accepting far too many students who were not prepared for college work. Opponents of the change pointed to a tradition of open admissions and predicted that there would be a sharp decline in total enrollment and in the enrollment of minority students.

The tightened standards required that students who wanted to enter CUNY’s baccalaureate programs attain certain scores on the SAT exam, the New York State Regents tests or CUNY’s own entrance exams.

“At one point, they basically had an open admissions policy and all these kids got in,” Mr. Slater said. “Then they changed their policy, and this is what happened.”

Mr. Slater said that CUNY, which has 17 undergraduate campuses, has been an important institution for black students, and that nearly 3 percent of all American black college students are at the university.

CUNY officials acknowledged the dip in the number of black students at three of their top schools, but argued that they had more black undergraduates last year than in 1999.

“Not only are we recruiting more black students onto our campuses, but we are graduating more, too,” said Selma Botman, CUNY’s top academic officer.

In 2004-05, an official said, 7,496 black students graduated from CUNY’s bachelor’s and associate’s degree programs, up from 7,151 five years earlier.

CUNY also has a black male initiative that it adopted last year, when it recognized how few black men were enrolled compared with the number of black women.

The declines in black enrollment appeared unrelated to the pipeline of students from New York City’s high schools. The number of black students graduating from public high schools in New York City grew to 11,754 in 2005 from 10,594 in 1999, according to the city’s education department.

When CUNY’s trustees approved the stricter admissions policies, the state Board of Regents questioned how much they would change the university’s racial balance.

Saul B. Cohen, a Regent and former president of Queens College, said yesterday that the declines for some of the individual campuses were “a bit surprising” and warranted another look.

But others said the decline in black enrollment at Hunter, Baruch and City College should not cause the university to shy away from strengthening its standards.

Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who served on Mr. Giuliani’s task force that evaluated CUNY, said yesterday that she believed CUNY was “absolutely on the right track.”

“I don’t believe that a college is in the business of engineering academic standards to achieve a particular racial outcome,” Ms. Mac Donald said. “It should set its standards in a colorblind fashion, based on the skills necessary to perform college-level work.

“These tests are hardly draconian,” she said, referring to the tests that CUNY examines to determine eligibility for its bachelor’s degree programs. “They are measuring very, very basic skills in reading and writing. It is not placing undue expectations on someone to show a very modest level of literacy.”

But Bill Crain, a psychology professor at City College, called the CUNY admissions process “deeply flawed” because black students do not do as well on standardized tests as other groups. Mr. Crain said the university “should really take another look at the admissions process, and put more weight on factors that really do predict success, like grades and motivation.”

While Baruch, Hunter and City College all had declines in their enrollments of black students, the proportion of black students at Brooklyn and Queens Colleges remained steady, representing about 30 percent of the undergraduates at Brooklyn and about 10 percent at Queens.

And even though black students were a smaller share of some CUNY campuses, those shares were still larger than at most other colleges in New York City and in the state, federal data show.

Officials at Baruch, Hunter and City College said that despite the declines in the number of black students, they were among the most diverse campuses in America.

“We are proud of our diversity,” said Mary Lou Edmondson, a spokeswoman at City College.

Laura M. Schachter, the dean for diversity and compliance at Hunter, said that many qualified black and Hispanic students did not know much about Hunter and did not apply. “It is our job to make them aware,” she said.

Officials at Baruch said they were trying to improve their recruiting. They also said that while the number of black students had fallen, they were doing better academically. Baruch now has 51 percent of its black students graduating within six years, up from 28 percent a decade ago.

James F. Murphy, assistant vice president for enrollment management, said Baruch had admitted about 2 percent more black students this year than in 2005, and was waiting to see how many enrolled. “We have our fingers crossed that we will see an improvement,” he said.

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