Corporate Recruiters Criticize Univ. of Wisconsin’s Lack of Diversity

MILWAUKEE

      The lack of diversity within the University of Wisconsin student body makes the school an increasingly disappointing campus at which to seek talent, a growing number of corporate recruiters are saying.

      Companies frequently target students with diverse backgrounds. But UW is statistically one of the least diverse schools in the Big Ten Conference.

      In 2005, only 10 percent of the university’s students identified themselves as Black, Hispanic, American Indian or Asian. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, that figure was 32 percent.

      UW has a larger enrollment of Asians in its college of engineering, but less than 5 percent of the other students there are minorities.

      In recent years, Alcoa, General Motors Corp. and a division of Procter & Gamble Co. said the lack of diversity in the school’s college of engineering is the reason they stopped recruiting there. Procter & Gamble has since resumed recruiting, but other corporations are threatening to look elsewhere unless the university increases its minority enrollment.

      One reason the university has few minorities is because the state has few minorities. State law mandates that 75 percent of UW’s undergraduates must be state residents. But Blacks and Hispanics make up just 10 percent of the population.

      The city of Milwaukee has a high minority population but its public school system, with its high dropout rates and low student performance, doesn’t feed large numbers of graduates to Wisconsin’s flagship university.

      It doesn’t help that the school has a reputation for being inhospitable to minorities, says Dr. Doug L. Henderson, a professor in the college of engineering.