For the last month, about 50 recent high school graduates of color have been on the campus of Minnesota State University, Mankato, waking up at 6:30 a.m., and working in college courses and tutoring sessions until 11:30 p.m.

“The students call it an academic boot camp because it is quite rigorous,” says Dr. Michael Fagin, MSU’s vice president for institutional diversity.

In an achievement ceremony Thursday, MSU honored the 47 survivors of this summer’s boot camp — officially known as College Access Program (CAP), a program that has been a major factor in Minnesota State, Mankato, having one of the fastest growing populations of students of color in the nation.

Since 2003, the university in rural southern Minnesota has almost tripled its students of color from 440, or 3.2 percent of the student body, to 1,064, or 8 percent, in 2007. This remarkable increase is not a coincidence.

When Dr. Richard Davenport began his tenure as president in the summer of 2002, he studied the makeup of the community and campus, he says.

“It appeared to me that in terms of students, faculty and staff of color, that we were underrepresented in this institution,” Davenport says. “So my goal was to promote and is to promote diversity and multicultural education and a general sense of global awareness.”

His promotion has worked and the increase doesn’t seem to be flattening out any time soon. It appears MSU will welcome twice as many first-year international students and 20 percent more transfer students of color this fall than it did last year, officials say. And MSU expects to boost its Black and Asian student populations another 30 percent by next year — all towards the goal of having 11 percent of the student body made up of students of color by 2010.

“Nothing succeeds like success, and we feel very successful in the increases we’ve been able to make in the last five years,” Fagin says. “And we are very optimistic about increasing the population and seeing it double itself in the upcoming five years.”