Minority Enrollment Lags In Race-neutral Washington
SPOKANE, Wash.
Despite eight years of effort, minority enrollment is still down at colleges and universities in Washington state after voters passed an initiative outlawing racial preferences in admissions.
Black, Hispanic and American Indian students are less likely to go from high school to college, and more likely to drop out, than their White peers. And fewer than 5 percent of faculty members in the state are members of any of those ethnic groups.
Yet minority groups are the fastest-growing segments of the population, expected to grow from 22 percent to 28 percent of Washington’s total by 2020.
“I think there has been progress, it’s just been slow progress,” says Ricardo Sanchez, an associate director of education policy for the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board. “People are feeling more and more the need to do better.”
A draft report by the HEC looked at Washington’s diversity efforts since the passage of Initiative 200 in 1998, and recommended improvements.
Educators gathered recently at Spokane Falls Community College to discuss the report, the first in a series of forums statewide.
“To many of us, the issue of diversity has a sense of urgency,” said Ben Cabildo, a board member for the Community Colleges of Spokane. “It affects our lives on a day-to-day basis.”
Dr. Gary Livingston, chancellor of the community college system, said he’s become accustomed to hearing about good programs that end after a year or two when the money runs out.
“There are so many false starts in what we do that we fail to see students through,” he said.
Among the report’s recommendations: establishing pre-college summer scholarship programs for minority students to bring them to campuses; expanding college outreach in junior and high schools; offering incentives and visiting professorships for faculty members of color and developing goals for diversity.
The report concludes that, while minority enrollments have recovered from a drop after 1998, they’ve now stalled or declined across the board.
This summer, the Community Colleges of Spokane spent about $10,000 advertising faculty openings in the Seattle and Tacoma area, in the hopes of attracting more diverse candidates, Livingston says. But it didn’t produce an increase in the schools’ minority faculty.
One reason may be that Spokane remains a largely White community,
he says, noting, “Diversity begets more diversity.”
— Associated Press
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
