Black Yield Second Again

As the first round of applications for the Class of 2008 begin to flood Byerly Hall, admissions officers are again facing the challenge of luring high-achieving black applicants to Harvard.

For the second straight year, Harvard’s yield of black students—the percentage of admitted applicants who enrolled at the College—was behind Stanford’s, and well below the yield for students of other racial backgrounds.

While the College’s overall yield was 79 percent for the Class of 2007, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE), the yield for black students was only 67 percent, compared to 68 percent for black students admitted to Stanford.

Harvard’s black student yield for the 2002-2003 admissions season marks a six percent jump from the previous year, when 61 percent of accepted black applicants enrolled at the College.

According to R. Bruce Slater, managing editor of the JBHE, Harvard’s yield numbers aren’t surprising given the high demand for top black students.

“There are only so many black students who score very high on their SATs, and all the top schools want the students with the highest scores, said Slater. “With the pressure to increase diversity, there is intense competition.”

As a result, according to Slater, all schools face difficulty increasing black yield, but Stanford’s efforts have been buoyed by the sharp decline in blacks applying to the University of California (UC).

The UC Board of Regents’ 1995 ban on affirmative action “gave a message to black students that maybe they weren’t as welcome there,” Slater said.

He said that, as a result, black students turned away from the system’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, and that Stanford—as “the other highly regarded research university in the state”—improved its yield of black students.

Moreover, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford’s principal private West Coast competitor, “has almost no black students whatsoever,” Slater said. CalTech’s Class of 2007 has zero black members, he said.

Director of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 agreed with Slater’s conclusion that intense competition for high-achieving black students depresses Harvard’s yield.

“Any group of students that are highly recruited by other colleges naturally have a lower yield,” she said.

“The African-American yield has been lower than the overall yield [at Harvard] but higher than the overall yield for most other Ivies,” Lewis said.

But according to Slater, black students may also be deterred by the lack of racial diversity among Harvard’s faculty.

According to the JBHE, black professors compose a smaller portion—2.7 percent—of the total faculty at Harvard than at every other Ivy except Princeton.

“Some students may see those figures and say, ‘there are not as many professors there to mentor me,’” Slater said.

According to Slater, Harvard’s standing among blacks suffered a further setback after former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74, a prominent scholar in what was then called the Department of Afro-American Studies, left Harvard for Princeton in 2002 following a spat with University President Lawrence H. Summers.

But the blow dealt by West’s exit was softened by Harvard’s positive reputation with regard to race relations, Slater said.

“In the 30 year history of affirmative action, Harvard has been at the forefront,” Slater said.

In March, Summers and Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe co-wrote a New York Times op-ed declaring their firm support for affirmative action, and the University filed an amicus brief in the recent Supreme Court cases on affirmative action.

McGrath Lewis said that she and other admissions officers worried that West’s exit and the surrounding circumstances would diminish the yield of black students.

In fact, McGrath Lewis said, “We had a better yield [of black students] after that had happened. Maybe we were so concerned about it that we redoubled our efforts.”

The racial disparity in yield statistics may be further explained by the fact that—at least historically—African-American applicants rarely were classified as legacies.

According to McGrath Lewis, “legacies yield at a slightly higher rate.” She noted, however, that Harvard is seeing an increasing number of black legacy applicants.

Although Lewis and her colleagues closely watch yield data, race does not play a role in Harvard’s recruiting strategy, she said.

“We offer a couple of hundred [low-income students] subsidized visits to Cambridge,” Lewis said. Students are selected for the program based on income information discerned from financial aid forms.

“We don’t do things by ethnicity. We don’t think that way,” Lewis said.

Olamipe I. Okunseinde ’04, president of the Black Students Association, said that Harvard should bolster its efforts to reach out to predominantly black public schools.

Black high school seniors, unlike other highly coveted applicants, feel an additional pull from historically black colleges and universities, she said.

“We still have guidance counselors telling [black students] not to go to schools like Harvard and Stanford because those schools ‘aren’t for them,’” said Okunseinde, who is also a Crimson editor.

The Office of Undergraduate Admissions’ Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, which dispatches Harvard students to recruit at diverse urban schools, is a powerful tool Okunseinde said.

According to Okunseinde, boosting black yield for the Class of 2008 largely depends on the success of pre-frosh weekend efforts.

The Stanford Daily reported that the university mounted a massive weekend-long exposition of multiculturalism when prospective students visited campus in April.

Blacks compose 8.5 percent of Harvard’s Class of 2007, compared to 6.9 percent of the previous first-year contingent. At Stanford, 12.3 percent of the Class of 2007 are black students, the highest percentage in the school’s history, according to the JBHE.

Yale, meanwhile, has watched the percentage of blacks in its first-year class fall over the last decade.

In 1993, black students composed 12 percent of Yale’s first-year class, but only 6.7 percent of the incoming Class of 2007, the JBHE reported.

Although black students were historically underrepresented in the fall admissions round, Lewis said that this year’s early action applicants, who are racing to finish their forms before tomorrow’s deadline, are expected to reflect the overall demographics of the applicant pool.