United Minorities Council Chairwoman Shakirah Simley considered going to a predominantly black college before applying to Penn. Simley, a College junior, said her family pushed her to apply to a mostly-black school, but she decided that Penn was the best place for her and applied early decision.
She is, however, part of a group underrepresented at the nation's top universities.
In 2001, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans made up about 22.4 percent of those enrolled in undergraduate programs, somewhat less than the 25.5 percent of the total American population that belonged to those groups in that year.
But at the nation's most elite institutions, the discrepancy is more pronounced. Between 12 and 13 percent of Americans are black, for instance, but the entering classes of top schools last year seldom approached that proportion.
At Duke University, the figure was 9.5 percent. At Penn, 7.6 percent. At Cornell, 5.6 percent. At the California Institute of Technology, 0.4 percent.
As top schools attempt to increase the diversity of their student bodies, they try a number of strategies to increase the number of minority students applying to colleges in general and to try to draw more of those who apply to their particular institution.
Earlier this year, for example, Penn attempted to increase its appeal to minority students by moving from its individualized application to providing the option of using the Common Application, which is accepted by about 300 schools.
Common Application
One of the motivations in including the option of applying with the Common Application next year, was to attract more minority applications, according to Penn President Amy Gutmann.
The Common Application, when supplemented with a school-specific essay, "really is a mechanism by which we can reach more students across all the diversities in our applicant pool," she said.
Admissions directors agree that the Common App helps swell the applicant pool -- both minority and otherwise.
Penn Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said surveys show that students of color, as well as those at the lower and middle economic levels, find submitting the Common Application less irksome than completing schools' individualized applications.
Amherst College Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Tom Parker agrees that the Common Application makes the process easier for everyone.
We "consider that a more humane way to treat people in this process," he said.
Harvard Senior Admissions Officer Roger Banks observed that the Common App helps widen the applicant pool.
"I strongly suspect that use of the Common Application has helped to broaden the base of candidates," he said.
But though Amherst's minority applicant pool rose from 993 students to 1,203 in the year after switching to the Common App, Parker said he cannot attribute the increase to the switch alone.
And that seems to be the consensus.
According to Diana Cordova, director of the Center for Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Equity at the American Council of Education, though the Common App helps widen the pool of applicants, there must be other strategies in place if colleges and universities truly want to increase the pool's diversity.
Financial Aid
Over the last several years, top schools have offered increasingly generous financial-aid policies for students from poorer backgrounds in hopes of drawing a more diverse applicant pool.
Last month, Penn instituted a no-loan financial aid policy for families with annual incomes under $50,000, but it was not the first to do so.
Amherst became the first American college to implement a no-loan financial-aid strategy in 1999, when it instituted a policy under which the school provides loan-free aid for families with incomes of under $40,000.
Parker said the policy has been extremely successful in recruiting minority applicants.
After Amherst's no-loan policy took effect, the number of minority applicants to the school increased from 952 to 1,039 in a year.
It's "getting them beyond the sticker shock," Parker said of overcoming the barrier created by cost. "We get to the point where we can talk."
Other colleges followed suit in switching to more generous financial-aid policies in the attempt to increase the diversity of the pool.
Williams, Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown, in addition to Penn, have all instituted no-loan financial aid policies.
Though Penn Financial Aid Director Bill Schilling says attracting minority applicants was not a motivation in the creation of the University's new policy, Gutmann says the new system should help.
"The financial aid policy [is] conducive to our attracting more students of color as applicants and recruiting more students of color," she said.
In 2004, Harvard took the idea that had been applied elsewhere one step further, eliminating not only loans but all parental contribution whatsoever for families with annual incomes lower than $40,000.
Earlier this month, Harvard raised that figure to $60,000.
Yale followed suit with a no-parental-contribution program for families with an income under $45,000 in March 2005.
Yale Director of Student Financial Services Caesar Storlazzi said that although this plan was intended to increase socio-economic diversity, it helped garner more minority applicants as well.
But "it was not specifically for minority applicants as for low-income," Storlazzi added. We "cannot assume income is tied to race, although there are some correlations."
Targeted Recruitment
In some cases, schools have also benefitted from actively seeking out certain types of applicants in addition to creating policies designed to attract such students.
Former Brown admissions officer and Penn Education graduate student Edward Brockenbrough said admissions offices need to "get off the beaten path and find kids who do not have the highest SAT scores but the same potential."
He cited the late '90s as a major time of success for Brown, when a black admissions officer began to recruit at public high schools in northern New Jersey with large Latino populations.
Admissions officers began to form relationships with the high schools' guidance counselors, he said, and by 2001, Brown had a steady stream of applications from these schools.
Brockenbrough himself did such recruiting in Philadelphia public schools that he said had never received admissions visits from top-tier colleges -- not even nearby Penn.
And at the city's Martin Luther King High School, he found the "quintessential diamond in the rough" -- a black student who had previously not considered a school like Brown.
After this student matriculated into Brown, Brockenbrough began to bring him back to recruit more students from his alma mater.
Last year, Gutmann tried a similar strategy for Penn when she went on a nationwide tour to speak to middle- and low-income students to convince them that Penn was a viable option.
This year, she made another recruiting sweep.
Deputy Provost Janice Bellace noted that an advantage to targeted recruitment is that admissions officers know where to find talented students.
Stetson added that Penn also holds a "Multicultural and Diversity Day" each September that 600 to 900 students come to to meet with representatives from the University's admissions and financial-aid departments.
National programs can also help colleges and universities target low-income students, and while these students are not necessarily more likely to belong to minority groups, as Storlazzi noted, "there are some correlations."
Questbridge -- a national non-profit organization that recruits talented low-income students and connects them with colleges -- is one program that has been successful in finding students and placing them in partnering colleges and universities. This past year, the program made 46 matches.
Chief Executive Tim Brady said the program is trying to incorporate Ivy schools next year.
And the earlier such programs identify promising students, the better it may be.
Penn Sociology professor Grace Kao said students should be targeted as early as 7th to 9th grade.
Ultimately, Brockenbrough said, finding the students who do not match the traditional "cookie-cutter profile" is the "key that a lot of places are missing out on."
In the end, however, diversity promotes diversity. Students want to be in an environment that they think will accept them.
And some think Penn may already enjoy an advantage in that arena.
Penn "has a diverse community," Simley said. "Students will feel at home no matter where they are from," said Simley, the United Minorities Council chairwoman.
"One of the main things that both I and my parents liked about applying to Penn is that it is the most diverse of all the Ivies," Wharton sophomore Craig Lindahl said.
Wellesley College spokeswoman Mary Ann Hill agreed that even with other programs in place, the applicant has to be able to see himself at the college in order to take it seriously.
The applicants must "see other students who physically look like them, come from similar backgrounds and similar parts of the country," she said.
