University of Michigan president pledges to make campus environment welcoming for minority students

MLive.com
May 1, 2008

"We'll do whatever it takes within the law - we follow the law - we'll do whatever it takes to create the kind of environment that will be a great experience," Coleman told the audience of about 100 people, mostly black, on Wednesday evening.
Invited to talk about higher education after Proposal 2, Coleman said the university has continued to refine and step up its recruitment efforts. But she said it needs support from the community to encourage students to apply, and if they are accepted, to enroll at U-M.
"We give every student applying to the university the opportunity to tell us what is special about you," said Coleman, during the talk at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
Approved by voters in November 2006, Proposal 2 barred consideration of race or gender in higher education, forcing the university to alter its admissions process and replace some scholarships.
Since then, U-M hired more admissions staff to help pore over applications. It has added programming at its Detroit Center on Woodward Avenue to increase its ties to Detroit, and a student group uses the center on Saturdays to offer SAT and ACT test-prep to local high schoolers, said Coleman.
As they have in previous years, faculty, students and Coleman have personally called admitted students to persuade them to enroll. Coleman said this year her entire executive team made phone calls.
Reporter Dave Gershman can be reached at 734-994-6818 or mailto:dgershmanr@annarbornews.com.And Coleman said the use of software from the College Board called DescriptorPLUS - which includes demographic and socio-economic data on neighborhoods and high schools across the country - has let the university better focus its outreach visits to high schools that haven't historically sent many students to the university. A director will be named next week for a new center on campus to support K-12 partnerships and increase the number of students interested in applying to the university.
Proposal 2 took effect midway through the admissions cycle of the freshman class that arrived on campus last fall. That class had 334 black students, four more than the previous year. But because the overall class size was larger, black students made up 5.8 percent of the class, the smallest proportion of black freshman dating back to at least 1998.
Later this month, U-M is expected to give the first clue to the demographics of the next freshman class when it releases information on students who've paid deposits to reserve a spot for next fall.
Katrina Carter of Detroit, one of the audience members, said the university is doing what it can to recruit minority students. "It's good to hear that it's an ongoing process and to kind of engage the community," she said. http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/05/university_of_michigan_preside.html