Diversifying Davidson?

examining the ins and outs of davidson's financial outreach

e m i l y d r e w

Stratton H. Lawrence, ’03, was born in Virginia and raised in Florida. He is registered to vote in North Carolina, resides in South and North Carolina, and is considered an international student by Davidson College because he attended high school for nine months in Rome. The situation seems contrived, as if Davidson’s trying to bulk its international numbers and look more diverse than it actually is. However, Davidson legitimately dubs Stratt “International” because he brings international experience to the school. Italian? No. Foreign? No. An asset to the college community? Yes.

And that’s what diversity is all about. According to Kathleen Stevenson-McNeely, Senior Associate Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, the institution of Davidson is “very eager to diversify the experience of students on a much broader cultural level.” Sounds good, but if we’re that eager to diversify, then why aren’t we seeing a little less white, a little less cash? How did only fifteen African American students of a total 468 enter this fall in the class of ’06, total? Why are only one third of Davidson students eligible for even the most minimal forms of financial aid?

First of all, as Stevenson-McNeely said, “If we define diversity on the basis of skin color, or socio-economic background, we define it too narrowly.”

Table 1: Average Financial Aid Package

Nancy Cable, Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, specified six different types of diversity that Davidson’s staff considers when analyzing college applications. These include socio-economic diversity, racial diversity, ethnic or international diversity, religious diversity, diversity of life experience, and geographic diversity.

“For us, the admissions process is like a funnel,” said Cable, explaining how prospective high school seniors are the input variables in a very long, deductive process. Applicants come from the pool of prospective students, and as the applications are filtered through, a group of accepted students is formed. From there, potential class size shrinks even more, as some accepted students decline admission. “A class’s diversity is only as good as the top of the funnel.”

Since Admissions can only accept students who apply, the recruiting process is a crucial opportunity for Davidson to find the best high school students from the most diverse backgrounds possible. Still, the whole process is an uncertain game, filled with fickle seventeen-year-olds and aggressive rival colleges who are all “very eager to diversify the experience of students on a much broader cultural level.”

John Dover, the Director of Multicultural Recruitment for Admissions and Financial Aid, specifically works to improve Davidson’s relations with black and Hispanic high school students who might otherwise look at schools with a history of strong black and/or Hispanic communities and alumni networks.

But Davidson doesn’t necessarily recruit specifically at black and Hispanic majority high schools. Instead, the recruiters look for high schools that prepare their students academically for the rigors of Davidson College. Competition is fierce for both high school students and Davidson. Currently Davidson is in the top ten most selective schools in the country with an acceptance rate of 34 percent .

Table 2: Percentage of Students Determined to Have Financial Need

The college faces bad odds, too. At over $32, 000 per year, many socio-economically diverse students might discard Davidson’s snazzy recruiting literature and opt for less expensive packages. “Someday we’d like to be able to increase the number of students who qualify for financial aid from roughly 30 percent to roughly 40 percent ,” says Stevenson-McNeely.

“Right now, the College is very blessed,” she says. “We have a need-blind admissions process, and because of a strong financial situation at the college, we can meet the established need of all current students who qualify for need.” Still, each student’s financial aid package is built within the constraints of a formula, and not all students are offered the amount that they would like or the amount they have been offered by other schools.

As for these students and those of the other five types of diversity, “We have to try to get them to want to come here, and they have to have the academic preparation to be able to thrive here,” said Stevenson-McNeely.

For example, recruiting a Catholic man from Ghana might not seem possible for a Presbyterian college in the Southeast US. But once in a while it happens, and such cultural exchange enhances the college experience of the recruit and of the entire student body.

Table 3: Non-White Students as a Percentage of the Student Body

As valuable as diversity is, at Davidson there’s no such thing as a “diversity quota,” a set number of certain types of students that must be matched. “We have certain academic and extra-curricular standards, and we do not compromise those in order to meet other criteria,” says Cable.

However, she adds, “We do have internal goals for what we’d like each class to be like,” including approximately a 50/50 gender split. Admissions staff also aims for at very least twenty-five to thirty African Americans and at very least twenty Hispanics in each class. Although Davidson attempts to pull applicants from all fifty states, the college is dedicated to keeping around fifty percent of each class from the Southeast U.S. Sorry Nebraska.

With strong alumni sources for financial aid scholarships, the department of Admissions and Financial Aid hopes for an increasingly diverse student body. “Improvement is definitely possible,” said Dover, “and in the long run, necessary.”

But diversity is a hard thing to define, not to mention improve. The process to becoming a more diverse campus is a long haul, too, especially if 50 percent of students are expected to be of one region of the U.S. Students like Stratt, though, help round out the Davidson experience. Rather than serving as an accessory to regional students’ educations, a student like Stratt, who has lived abroad, brings a whole array of miscellaneous ideas to the educational environment. The point is, by the time Davidson students graduate, they will each be more diverse because of their interaction with each other.

Still, though, we do only have only fifteen new African American students on campus this year. Davidson as a community needs to fess up to this problem. Diversity certainly includes an array of characteristics, but successes in areas like international recruitment should not excuse failures in other fields. There are millions of ethnic minorities and low-income students who have what it takes to survive Davidson. We complain and brag a lot about the Davidson education, but its academic rigor in no way excuses an entering class with only 3.20 percent African-American students. What does academic rigor have to do with being a certain ethinicity anyway?

Yes, there are factors working against the school’s efforts to diversify in certain areas, but, to be gracious, Davidson’s population minimally reflects the intense diversity found in the rest of the world. Yes, thestaff at Admissions and Financial Aid works hard to figure out what’s best for the student body and Davidson’s regional traditions. But traditions should not define our future.

Slowly, diversity has been increasing at Davidson over the past ten years, and the Admissions staff seeks open-mindedness in non-diverse applicants, too. “We always look for majority students who are open to issues of diversity,” says Cable. “We credit applicants who have given evidence of social concern, and we consider them as well.”

That’s where guys like Stratt enter the picture. Even though he’s a US citizen, his time abroad as a high school student was a unique cultural time that other Davidson students can learn about first-hand by getting to know Stratt. “I still don’t really get why I’m an international, though,” he says, “but I think I want to run for Homecoming Court with DIA.”