Wyoming Seeks to Boost Numbers of Minority Students

LARAMIE, Wyo.

A new committee has been formed at the University of Wyoming to help boost enrollment of
minorities.
The Multicultural Campus Visit Committee is aiming to increase ethnic enrollment to 1,400 students by 2005.
"Our committee's goals right now are to increase the number of minority students at UW and to increase the number of minority students visiting UW," says Dominic Martinez, committee chairman and coordinator of minority student recruitment in the university's admissions office.
Recruitment and retention of minority students also was included in the school's academic plan.
One of the group's first accomplishments was to organize all minority visitation programs "under one umbrella," Martinez says. Those programs include recruiting visits to campus by the state's high school and elementary school students. 
Committee members include the director of the Office of Minority Affairs, representatives from the Graduate School, Admissions Office, the Campus Activities Center and student organizations.
"We want to let minority students and their parents know early how important it is for them to receive a college education," Martinez says.
Minority enrollment is less than 1,000 at the 11,600-student school, and the group's goal is to increase the enrollment to 10 percent of the total, comparable to the ethnic minority college-age population in the state. For the 1999-2000 school year, 878 students were minorities out of the total student population of 10,940 — 101 were African American; 117 were American Indian; 114 were Asian; 349 were Hispanic/Latino and 197 were biracial or another ethnicity.