A Time for Innovative Thinking

In a recent article in Black Issues In Higher Education, a U.S. Department of Education official stated that he knew of few strategies for making graduate and professional school accessible to African Americans. Since I knew of at least one (I developed it), I e-mailed it to him. He remarked on its timeliness given the admissions cases now before the U.S. Supreme Court and wished that I could share it with everyone. Taking his words to heart, I offer it to others in the hopes that we will all take up the challenge to think and act creatively about how we approach diversity in the 21st century.

For seven years, I was the assistant dean for student affairs at the graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland-College Park. When I arrived in the fall of 1988, there was only one African American pre-career master's student in a class of 35. I was charged by the dean with increasing both the size and diversity of the pre-career student population and named non-voting chair of the admissions committee to lead the effort. During my seven years at Maryland, I learned that admissions is an art, not a science. It cannot be reduced to multiple regressions of standardized test scores and grade point averages (GPAs) to determine success.

As chair of the admissions committee, I soon realized that many students of color were being rejected because of abysmal performances on the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), the required standardized test for our program, despite solid GPAs in the appropriate undergraduate majors. In the minds of the faculty, these low scores on the more "objective" standardized test indicated that the students' GPAs were inflated. Upon interviewing the students, I discovered, to my horror, that many were walking into the test and taking them cold, having been told by the creator of the test, the Educational Testing Service, or faculty advisers that one could not prepare for such tests.