Helping Your African American Student with the College Admissions Process

Parents Forum
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@gablesdad Just sent you a message with two college advisors.

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@KinestheticKT , there are quite a few LACs that have higher or at least equivalent percentages of AfAm students as comparable to big research U’s. I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that there isn’t a platform for AfAm kids to express themselves at LACs. If anything, AfAm students seem to thrive in the collaborative and nurturing environment that LACs can provide.

Take a look at a list such as this.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges
You will probably find that many of colleges on this list have above average numbers of AfAm students who are very involved in campus life.

Re fly-in programs, I suspect that for the upcoming admissions cycle, a lot of those may not be happening this year, unfortunately.

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@Lindsgaf thanks for your feedback and info. Before HS my daughter’s attended a pre-college program where they visited a great deal of LAC’s and a few research schools. One of the highlights for them (and for me when I attended) is when the panel discussions were held with African American and Latinx students giving them the real deal on what really went down in the schools. It was an up close look at what we would never be able to see and hear from a tour and an info session.

Students at some LAC schools explained to us that their schools gave them ability to express themselves, join or start social justice orgs on campus, ask questions and be authentically who they were and who they were growing to be. Other students at other schools painted an entirely different picture of the platform they were given. Let’s just say, not so pretty. So my point is that it is important to me and to my daughters to find a fit and a school that embraces students of all ethnic backgrounds and where she feels she will have that platform. I think it is fair to say “some” LAC’s may not have an obvious platform when students clearly said it to us
 even though it appears it was there, they said don’t believe the hype! But I absolutely agree that some schools do and that experience was illustrated to us as well. We are on the same page because I believe their is a nurturing for students at LAC’s. Close relationships with professors and small class sizes go along way. We have seen this and my oldest who is going to an LAC (well on line for fall) believes she found what she was looking for.

Now I do believe that some student will make strides to find a platform regardless. And some schools may have it and a student might not have done their due diligence to figure things out. But every child is not the same. As a parent of a HS senior that is strong academically but sometimes struggles socially, I am looking for the right place for her.

Now @Sarrip I so have to heed your words! I have to back up and tell myself “Self, do not get caught up! it’s not you going to college it’s them!” They may not want the same things you did. Now they went to the same HS, yet one is a social butterfly the other more cerebral. So although I know them and what I believe maybe good for them, I still work hard not to project my idea of a college experience on them. Thanks for the reminder!

@ProfSD my daughter was all over the east coast and just last night said she was researching BC and BU. She is also looking at Northeastern, Wesleyan and Conn College in New England when before she was only interested in Emory Spelman, HU & Wash U. We have a meeting tomorrow after her research to discuss a long list. But it is interesting to see her thoughts and reasoning in the process. I put Hamilton, Colgate and Vassar out and she has some opposition to NY state. (Which can change). I do wonder where the preconceived ideas of areas come from at 17 years old. But we will see!

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Hi @Lindagaf , minority representation is important to me when I look for universities that might be appropriate for my children. However there are two things to consider alongside raw percentages. The actual number of minority students in general and AA specifically. And the percentages/actual number of minority staff in general, and AA staff specifically.

Percentage wise, some LAC look like they’re making a great effort to recruit minority students. Let’s take a look at Williams College, the #1 LAC on that list. WC’s enrollment is 6.86% AA and 30%+ of students are PoC. At first blush that looks great, and I certainly will not criticize them for those numbers. Still, 6.86% is barely half of what it should be if the AA representation matched the USA %. But as a AA parent, I know that if I make the standard 13%, I will have to eliminate nearly every PWI in America because very few are truly as diverse as the overall population of America. So we force ourselves to say 6.86% shows great effort on WC’s behalf.

However, as a parent, I owe it to my children to look a little deeper. Part of the issue with LAC is they have smaller overall enrollments. WC has 2078 underclassmen. At 6.86%, that would translate to 142 AA students. In the event a particular LAC turns out to be one where the students of each category tend to not mingle, that presents my AA child with a friendship pool of only 142 students who “look like him.”

That’s a big shift from his high school, which has a few hundred more students overall than Williams College. Because his high school was truly diverse, it has about 33% AA students. So, though WC can rightfully be hailed as walking-the-walk when it comes to diversity, my child is still moving from a diverse high school where he was surrounded by nearly 900 AA students to a “diverse” college campus of roughly the same size where he would be one of only 142 AA students on campus.

This is only one statistic or facet AA parents consider. And when deeply considering a school, often no single factor is large enough to be the sole deciding factor. In addition to all the things non-minority parents have to consider when it comes to helping their child choose a school for fit, minority parents have much more. And if it’s a single-parent and/or low-income and/or first-gen and/or immigrant household, the challenge of making an informed decision is even more daunting.

One of those factors (for me, and some other minority parents) is “how big is the platform for minority (personally for my family, specifically African-America) students to express themselves.” Even for small things.

For instance, I remember being on a large PWI campus in the 80s. On my hall, it was typical for guys to leave their doors open and their music playing loud. No white hallmates ever made noise complaints against other white hallmates. They never made complaints against any hallmate who blasted Rock N Roll or Country music. However, when Black hallmates played Hip-Hop or Soul music, the RA would soon come knocking.

Of course, in today’s time, music is less segregated than it was when I was in college, but I remain concerned that my children will be at a campus where that sort of racist behavior doesn’t occur in any situation. But it’s hard to figure that out without a lot of research, and that research has to be reproduced for every option on the list. If, that is, I want to help ensure my child lands on a campus that truly welcomes and deserves him.

And that’s just one thing.

EDIT: Let’s take a quick look at the AA enrollment (source Princeton Review) for each of the USNWR top 10 on that list.
Williams College 6.86%
Amherst 10.17%
Swarthmore 7.72%
Wellesley unreported
Pomona 9.72%
Bowdoin 8.05%
Carleton 4.83%
Claremont McKenna 4.42%
Middlebury unreported
Washington & Lee 2.69%

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@EconPop , good post. LACs are going to appeal to some kids and not others. Many people don’t even know they exist, and of those who do, some are put off by their small size. A lot of kids don’t want to attend a college smaller than their high school.

Your perspective is interesting. If sheer numbers of AfAm students are a consideration to your child, did HBCU’s come into the mix?

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But there’s the rub. I love HBCUs, but in 2020 should an AA family be forced to continue to default to that as the sole option? For some students (all students, not only AA students) HBCUs are fantastic options. I have no doubt that my son could attend an HBCU and have a great education and launch into adulthood. But in my son’s case, he’d never attended a school that was not truly diverse. He isn’t seeking an all-Black environment any more than he is seeking an all-White environment.

The problem is, with very few exceptions, there are not many options for an AA student who wants to attend a truly racially diverse university. I’m talking about a school that has an overall minority representation of 35%+, including an AA representation of at least 10%. And once each AA student considers the other facets of their individual fit, that list is probably 1 school 
 if they are lucky.

When considering ALL facets of fit, most AA students often have to either choose an HBCU for true racial fit or accept they will be attending a university with AA representation around 3%-7%.

Many AA students want to attend HBCUs. Many do not, even as they appreciate and love HBCUs.

And lets not omit the consideration of rankings. Though we all try to say rankings should not matter, for some families they matter, if only a little. And when the national ranking agencies continually omit all but only 4-5 HBCUs from their rankings, that leaves an AA student with good stats a dicey proposition. Get accepted into one of those ranked HBCUs (it’s not easy to get into Howard or Spellman these days, if you haven’t checked) with enough aid to make it affordable. Or accept that you know you’re attended a respected HBCU, even if it’s ranked 784. That works for some families, but not all.

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The very most diverse colleges in the country are generally not the household names, that’s for sure.
https://www.bestcollegereviews.org/features/top-ethnically-diverse-colleges/

California is pretty well represented in this list.

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One thing that both of my kids were also interested in was how the school presented top performing students of color. The raw percentages mattered (especially top professors and students who looked like my kids), but their was 1 particular dynamic at their diverse competitive suburban school that they noticed that bothered them. As both of my kids went into high level STEM AP classes, the number of Black students dropped substantially. My introverted son has been overlooked often despite having top notch statistics and was comfortable staying that way at his high school. My kids ended up choosing the same highly ranked HBCU for different reasons and I have seen growth in both. My daughter have AA friends who have applied for the Rhodes, Goldwater, and other prestigious scholarship awards that has made her interested in pursuing a similar course of action next year. She has had multiple mentors who have given her unbelievable opportunities to excel and has built a confidence in herself that she never gained in high school despite being a great student. My son is an incoming freshman who spent 10 hour days virtually taking classes, seminars, and study halls Monday thru Friday with his incoming Scholarship cohort for 6 weeks and he is already made what I believe to be life long friends who are brilliant and look like him. My son has had very few friends throughout his youth so watching him grow like this has been a joy for my wife and I.

I believe that all students could be helped by looking at fit from many different angles, but I have seen over the years how important fit can be, especially to students of color. My kids could have been successful at a lot of schools including some of the more prestigious schools that they were accepted into. But for them, a HBCU looks like it may have been the “best fit”. For other AA students in a similar situation, choosing a more prestigious PWI could be the better choice, so I always advocate for students choosing the best school for them that is affordable. And for others, choosing a LAC, or staying closer to home may be the best choice. The students who have had the best outcomes that I have seen have picked affordable options that were also an outstanding fit.

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Lots of that may be due to state and local populations, since California (and Texas) state populations have relatively high ethnic diversity. However, California has a relatively low African American population generally, and that tends to be reflected at many otherwise-diverse colleges in California as well.

Note also that California has many colleges that are neither HBCU nor PWI.

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Previous posters have already accurately stated most of my thoughts about the college search and admissions process for AfAm students. I want to emphasize a couple of things. Parents have to deep dive to help their AfAm student and any student of color investigate all of the unique “fit” issues presented in this thread and cannot rely on school guidance counselors. My daughter is a Sophomore at Stanford. When she was in high school at an extremely diverse Title I stem school, number 1 in her class, I was stunned when I sat in on a course selection meeting and her guidance counselor shook his head (no) and discouraged her from being interested in Rice University because “Rice is too hard to get in to and no one from our school has ever gotten in there”. I knew right then that we were essentially on our own in the college process. Fast forward 3 years and she was the first student from her school to be accepted at multiple Ivies plus Rice, Vanderbilt and Stanford. She attended some flyins that we only knew about from our own research—her school guidance counselor had never heard of flyins (how is that possible at a high performing but predominately low income school that was 60% Hispanic, 24% Black, 2% Caucasian, and the rest a very international mix???). Beginning her high school junior year, seeing how little help her school was, she took the 4 top students (two AfAm, two Hispanic) in the class below her under her wing and started mentoring them. We shared all we learned along the way. She gave them the SAT and ACT study manuals she had researched, used and found the most helpful. She told them about the flyins, summer research programs, and shared what she learned about colleges campuses and her perception of college life at places she had gotten to visit, then encouraged setting up schedules to get their applications done and she reviewed essays. Guess where those students ended up going to college
MIT, Princeton, and Cornell. I cannot emphasize enough that many low income high schools are only working to get students in to the local universities and community colleges—please, if you are able, pass along what you learn and help/ mentor other students of color and their families as they select and apply to college.

One final thing that I found very interesting and may be useful. I recently asked my daughter what is the one most helpful resource she has at Stanford. She said the Black @ Stanford chat. (sorry I don’t remember what media platform that is on—If your student is attending Stanford and wants to know, or any other questions about Stanford, reach out to me and and I will find out).

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https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ can fill in some blanks.

Wellesley 6% https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=wellesley&s=all&id=168218#enrolmt
Middlebury 4% https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=middlebury&s=all&id=230959

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Exactly.

Also, getting back to LACs, it’s not necessarily that my son did not want to attend a school with 2000-3000 students. It’s true that he was more attracted to enrollments in the 4-6K range or the 8-11K range, but he would have been happy to attend the right LAC. For him, having only 140 AA students on campus was not a draw. A school with only ~100 AA students would have to ace all his/our other requirements/desires to
end up being the choice.

One of the things about some schools that appealed to me was the overall vibe. For instance, Wooster not only has 8.63% AA students, but it had 16.18% Internationals and a lot of those are PoC – also, once a parent studies CoW it because readily apparent how much they value all their students and how hard CoW works to ensure all students feel at home and feel wanted. Knox College also appealed for those reasons.

Meanwhile, other schools, and I won’t mention specific names now, talked a good game, but they don’t appear to be delivering. I don’t need promises, I want results. Another forum I participate in has an untenured professor-of-color from FSU. She said that one of the larger colleges on campus of FSU has never actively tenured an AA professor - they have hired AA professors tenured elsewhere but never tenured one of their own. Seeing that my son would have been a student in a department in that college, that was something that warranted my concern. If that college (within the greater FSU) had never respected any AA professor enough to tenure him/her, how am I to interpret how that college will respect my child? At LACs, I may allow more leeway about making AA professors in his department a must, but the LAC better strongly prove their diversity bonafides in other ways.

It was always refreshing to get someone’s opinion on the AA life at random universities. It’s a hard ask for one person to keep up with so many. The AA parents on CC helped in this a lot.

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@Outlander , that’s fascinating. I almost guarantee you that your daughter has now put her high school on the radar of a lot of elite schools.

@EconPop , very useful information. Yet another reason why it’s so important to make people aware of these issues.

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I just took another look at that list and saw Houston. One of my son’s best friends is going there in a few weeks. He had high stats and his family has the financial ability to send him to more prestigious schools, but he specifically chose UH because of its diversity. Naturally, he wanted to go to a quality school, but because that qualification narrows down the options to well over 200 schools, diversity helped narrow the list to a more manageable amount. From that short list, UH quickly became his favorite.

If money was not factor for us, I would have considered UH for my son. He was definitely attracted to it. With their newly altered promise to meet need for all in-state students, UH is a great option for Texas residents seeking diversity.

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Agree. The FSU situation is a great example of a red flag. That is certainly revealing (and not in a good way). I also agree that it’s trickier to look at faculty numbers for guidance on how some LACs feel about issues around diversity and inclusivity. I posted this last year on another thread, but I think it’s worthwhile:

While a lack of faculty and staff can be revealing, I would not write off a school based on that without doing a bit more research. I know first hand that there can be other reasons for such low numbers. Location is often a MAJOR factor.

I’m an AfAm female professor. When I was still in grad school I would attend various conferences for grad students every year. There were often reps from many Northeast SLAC in attendance handing out business cards and trying to get URM grad students to visit their school and apply for open positions. I remember privately laughing with other Black and Latinx students that we would never consider some of these schools due to location. Although I’m from MA, there was NO WAY I was heading to Vermont, Maine, NH, or upstate NY. We didn’t care if it was a top ten LAC or not. Students and their parents are not the only people that want diverse communities. My fellow URM grad students and I were not eager to live in an area with few POC. These schools still came to conferences every year in a sincere effort to recruit faculty of color, but we were not interested. Sometimes a college has a difficult time due to its location and the surrounding community. There is little they can do to overcome that.

Now of course, if the location is stellar then that is another matter


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My household is a clear example of this. As I mentioned, D20 is attending a SLAC that is only 4.5-5% Black (depending on the year). She applied ED there, and her EDII choice is only 8% Black. H and I are both comfortable with her choice because of the extensive research I mentioned above. It’s a great fit for her, and we are VERY excited she is able to head to campus in a few weeks.
(I should add that H and I both attended PWIs for undergrad and grad and loved our college experiences, so perhaps that has helped with our comfort level.)

S23 is a completely different kid and wants no part of LACs. Even schools with a 5,000 student body are pushing it for him. It didn’t matter what the profs and students said when we visited. He was visibly bored on the college tours and openly balked at the LAC experience. It didn’t matter if it was Amherst or Wesleyan with a much higher percentage of Black students on campus. He is not interested in that experience in any way. He didn’t even want a sweatshirt or tee from my husband’s alma mater (Bowdoin)! LOL

It’s interesting starting this search all over with new criteria. While some concerns are the same (see my earlier posts), there is A LOT that will be different. The information I gathered about LACs is useless this time around. He is interested in Comp Engineering and Comp Sci programs at universities with at least 5,000 undergrads. I’m starting from scratch.

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That brings up its own complications in college search, due to the popularity of the major to the point that the CS/E majors are “full”.

  • Some colleges that admit by major are more selective at frosh admission for CS/E majors than others.
  • Some colleges have competitive secondary admission processes or high college GPA requirements to declare or change to the CS/E majors.
  • Some colleges ration CS courses even for CS majors (e.g. Swarthmore).
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@ProfSD , excellent posts. Re profs not wanting to live in some of those more rural places, that’s a great insight for all parents and students. My D attended an LAC in Maine and had great professors, but I did find myself wondering sometimes how they ended up there. I might be naive in thinking it’s for the love of the students, haha.

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In many academic subject areas, the number of new PhD graduates far outnumbers the number of openings for tenure-track faculty jobs, and there is not enough non-academic demand for PhD graduates in those subject areas to hire the rest. So it would not be surprising if many of those in tenure-track faculty jobs in what they consider less desirable locations are there because that is the only tenure-track faculty job available for them.

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I have spent some time helping several African-American students who I have tutored and mentored over the years. I consider those kids to be “my African American Students” as well. I have talked about the issue of CC only being helpful to a small subset of African-Americans as a general topic when CC asked how to help African-American students and their families. CC can be very helpful to motivated African-American high achievers like most of the children talked about on this thread so far, but how do we help the 1st gen. student with a 3.3 UW GPA and 19 ACT/1000 SAT with a couple of ECs (that is about the composite of what I see at my Church’s Youth Ministry) reach their educational goals? Those are the kids that tend to fall through the cracks of the college admissions process (especially when it comes to funding an education).

It was very easy for people on CC to give advice to my African-American kids (3.96 UW GPA/1470 SAT and 3.8 UW GPA/35 ACT in high school), but how do we advise those who have not had the same opportunities or support system in place? What do we say to the “late bloomer” who has no ECs besides working, a 2.8 UW GPA who has not taken any standardized test as of early October of Senior year who says they want to go to Georgia Tech and become an engineer (Without being mean spirited which I have definitely seen on CC with even high achieving students)? You help that student formulate a realistic “workable plan”. Here are a few of the questions that I ask students.

  1. What do you want to do when you graduate high school (what are your goals)?
  2. How do you foresee achieving your goals?
  3. What is your back up plan if things do not work out?
  4. How are you planning to fund your educational pursuits? Do you know the costs of getting an education? Have you talked to your parent/guardian about your goals and what support you hope to receive from them?

I prefer for students to figure out how realistic or unrealistic their goals are on their own and then help them find a viable solution or alternatives (college, picking up a trade, working, joining the military, school and work, etc.). The students that I have the softest spot for are young African-American males who already have the work ethic and drive, but have not always received the best academic preparation and support (financial/familial). I would love to see more parents speak from the perspective of helping a student with more challenges than my own kids on CC, but that does not happen nearly as often as my real world interactions.

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