Damage Control

Although minority enrollment is on the rise in Texas, Higher education officials say that achieving diversity will be a continuing struggle

By Chris Newton

CANYON, Texas — The admissions director at West Texas A&M University remembers her reaction to the Hopwood ruling that state colleges and universities could no longer consider race in recruiting and financial aid.
"We were in a panic," Lisa Blankenship says. "This wasn't just a minor consideration. This meant that there were going to be completely new rules to the game — and those rules gave us a definite handicap when compared to other states."
Blankenship expected that Texas would be raided by out-of-state schools that still could offer the scholarships and other preferences to minority students that they no longer could. But things have changed at the small, West Texas school — and not the way she expected. Despite the Hopwood ban, minority enrollment has inched up.
In 1998, 136 Black students attended the school, up from 121 the year before. The number of Hispanics rose to 572 in 1998, up from 566 the previous year. And this year, the 2.7 percent Black enrollment surpasses the 2.3 percent that was recorded in 1996 — before the Hopwood ruling took effect.
The Hopwood decision is the case in which a federal appeals court found in 1996 that the University of Texas School of Law's former admissions policy discriminated against Whites.
"What happened is, we knew that we were going to make more of a concerted effort to travel and talk with students and really get them to understand the great things we have to offer," Blankenship says of her institution's reaction to the Hopwood decision.
While West Texas did not spend a great deal more money to implement its stepped-up recruitment effort,  the admissions and recruitment staff did make more aggressive strides than in the past to target high schools with diverse populations and spend additional time with students of color at those campuses.
Beyond these changes and the application of the state's new 10 percent rule, which makes students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class automatically eligible for enrollment to the state's public colleges and universities, Blankenship says that the Hopwood decision has had little affect on her institution.