By Jennifer ChenThe Daily Northwestern
Black enrollment at Northwestern has dropped by almost half in the past three decades, a DAILY study of university records found.
The community has shrunk steadily since 1976, when NU’s black undergraduate enrollment reached its height at 9.6 percent. Then, there were 667 such students on campus.
By 2005, blacks made up 5.5 percent of NU’s 8,023 undergraduates.
Asian American enrollment leapt from 12 percent to 17 percent between 1992 and 1994, and has hovered at about 16 percent. Latino numbers have tended to increase, reaching 5.2 percent last year.
According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black populations at several other top U.S. universities – including Harvard University, Columbia University, Duke University, and Stanford University among others – have topped or neared 10 percent of their student bodies. At Washington University in St. Louis, the number is 6.2 percent, while at the University of Chicago it is 6.4 percent.
NU’s downward trend was no surprise to the NU Black Alumni Association, which has begun pressing the administration to react to the decreasing numbers. But it was only after chatting with black alumni at a Homecoming Tailgate that For Members Only Acting Coordinator Monica Harris heard of the decline.
“I was talking with alumni, and they told me that we were close to 10 percent (of the total undergraduate population) in the ’80s,” the Weinberg junior said. “The only response we could give was, ‘We’ve never seen that before in our time. We’ve been lucky to have 500 students.'”
The last time black undergraduate enrollment was at about 500 was 1992, with blacks at 6.8 percent of the undergraduate population. Since then it has dropped to the low 400s.
Harris said the FMO board was “literally in shock” when she told them that black enrollment used to hover around 10 percent.
It was a wake-up call for the students, Harris said, to have the alumni look at the university and say, “This is not how it is supposed to be.”
HISTORY OF BLACK ENROLLMENT
The story of black enrollment at NU begins by and large in 1966, when the predominantly white university saw the arrival of 54 black freshmen on campus. The year before, there were only five.
In an effort to bring the fight against racial inequality to NU, university administrators had actively recruited students in black inner-city communities. With special focus on the Chicago area, NU created programs and summer academic workshops for black youths.
Through the administration’s work, black enrollment swelled to 667 within 10 years.
The administration, however, failed to recognize that NU’s social scene was “inhospitable and that black students themselves did not arrive as blank slates,” according to an account from the Office of African American Student Affairs.
Tensions erupted on May 3, 1968, weeks after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
For two days, 110 black NU students took over the Bursar’s Office, demanding improvements to the situation of black students.
Black student leaders and NU representatives drafted the document, known as the May 3rd-4th Agreement, a few days later.
The agreement spurred the creation of the African American Studies program and the Office of African American Student Affairs. The university also pledged in writing to “increase the number of black students at Northwestern” and to intensify recruitment efforts.
One of the last great pushes came in 1999, when NU created its Chicago Initiative program to reach out to inner-city and parochial schools in the area to recruit Latino and black students.
But the decline seems to have continued.
NU President Henry Bienen cautioned that when looking at university enrollment data, one must consider a margin of error of 1 or 2 percent. With an increase in the number of students who omit sharing their racial identity on college applications, percentages should not be seen as concrete facts, he said.
But many alumni are still concerned.
“For many black alumni, the gains made in the ’60s and ’70s represented a gain in power at the university,” said NU Black Alumni Association President Ce Cole Dillon, SESP ’78. “Now we know what we thought was power was actually just a concession. If you have real power, you hold the gains. Concessions can be taken back.”
varying theories
Theories explaining why black enrollment has fallen vary.
University officials cite heightened competition among colleges for minority students, coupled with the draw of brand name schools such as Harvard and Yale.
“The competition is formidable,” said Michael Mills, associate provost for University Enrollment. “Highly talented African-American high school seniors may be the most sought-after group of students in the country, and we try to do our best against the Ivy League and quasi-Ivy schools.”
Gaining acceptance into NU also has become “significantly more difficult” in the last 25 years, he added. Mills and Bienen agreed that while the competition for black students has ratcheted up, the number of qualified black applicants has not kept pace.
“NU was early on the game of trying to recruit good African-American students, and lots of other universities got into the act, and the pool that was available didn’t expand,” Bienen said. “You may not like the fact, but that’s a fact. It has to do with inner-city school systems and a lot of things.”
Mills and his recruitment team continue to visit all the major Chicago-area high schools while traveling the country.
The folkloric nature of the Ivy League mystique, however, often travels faster and farther than Mills and his team can manage.
An appeal of non-Ivy League schools is often their “very aggressive” use of merit-based financial aid for black students who would not qualify for NU’s need-based aid, Mills said.
Alumni said that although they love NU, they do not want to saddle their children with college loans to pay for the school’s increasing tuition.
Another concern of alumni parents is the glaring 5.9 percent statistic of black enrollment.
“Many alumni, when they look at that number, are concerned about their children being in that environment,” Dillion said. “NU was hard at 10 percent.”
Dillon said she feels alumni have not done everything in their power to boost numbers for historical reasons.
“For many of us there in the ’70s, it was as if we were there by force, like, ‘We don’t want you to be here, but you’re here anyway,'” Dillon said. “So a lot of us left.”
Silent alumni might be a reason why many black students have never heard of NU.
If not for a pre-college program run out of Marquette University that brought her to NU for a tour, FMO’s Harris would have never known about the university, just like everyone else at her high school in Milwaukee, she said.
“Students in inner-city communities aren’t exposed to schools like this,” she said. “They’re not put on your list unless someone shows you that it can be.”
Bienen also said demographic changes in the U.S. have changed NU’s makeup.
But for Dillon, shifting demographics do not justify the decline in black enrollment.
As other ethnic minorities populated the U.S., the university did not keep its commitment to the black students, Dillon said.
“As long as they had students of color, that was enough,” she said. “But I don’t think we are interchangeable. I think you make a commitment to having good students and having the student body be reflective of society at large, and I don’t think NU has really done that, though other universities have.”
reversing the trend
Regardless of how one explains the decline of black enrollment, NU officials, alumni and students agree that more needs to be done.
The Office of Admissions’ minority recruiters will continue to make calls, and Mills said they have “expanded the
ir travel significantly and intend to continue to do so.”
Two weeks before Homecoming, NU alumni teamed with FMO to sponsor their inaugural 5K Run/Walk to fund a scholarship for incoming black students. The scholarship is the only one of its kind at NU.
Along with fundraising for the scholarship and strengthening their relationship with each other, the black alumni organization and FMO said they are adding the issue of black enrollment to their agendas.
“We are going to do what it takes to ensure that a great institution like NU continues the history and tradition it’s had of black students,” Dillon said.
Alumni said they want the university to take a stand now like it did 30 years ago and reaffirm its commitment to their cause, said Sidmel Estes-Sumpter, Medill ’76 and ’77.
An active alumna and, as she puts it, probably the only Georgian flying an NU flag from her front lawn, Estes-Sumpter is on NU’s Black Alumni Association’s Executive Board, Alumni Recruitment Council, Medill Board of Advisors and Admissions Council.
She has brought up the problem of black enrollment with both the president and provost before, she said. Their responses, however, were just “a lot of lip talk.”
“They said they’re trying to address those various needs, but I will say that I do not think the university has given any tangible evidence that they are serious about reversing this trend,” she said.
Estes-Sumpter and Dillon said there needs to be a game plan to increase recruitment, dialogue and that old commitment.
“I love NU. I love what it did for me. It made me a strong black woman,” Estes-Sumpter said. “But NU is not the NU I grew up with. We were one of the so-called liberal universities that would push social agendas. Now we don’t want to talk about those issues because they’re too ‘uncomfortable.’ I am challenging NU to be that university again.”
Reach Jennifer Chen at [email protected].
