The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor said today it had managed to avoid a steep decline in the number of black, Hispanic, and Native American students in this fall’s entering freshman class, the first to be admitted after Michiganders voted a year ago to amend their state’s Constitution to prohibit public higher-education institutions from considering applicants’ race or ethnicity.
Officials at the university cautioned, however, that much of this fall’s class was admitted before its admissions office began complying with the ban on affirmative-action preferences, known as Proposal 2, on January 10.
Theodore Spencer, the university’s associate vice provost and director of undergraduate admissions, said in a statement issued yesterday that “the full impact of Proposal 2 is not reflected in the current year’s enrollment numbers because it took effect midway through the admissions cycle.” The university will “have a more accurate indication of its potential impact in fall 2008,” he said.
The university said it had taken in 334 black freshmen, a 1.2-percent increase over last year; 267 Hispanic students, a 2.6-percent decline from last year; and 50 Native American students, a decline of two students, or nearly 4 percent. It took in 757 Asian-American freshmen, an increase of 135 students, or nearly 22 percent, and its white freshman enrollment rose by about 9.8 percent, to 3,741, or 65.2 percent of the entering class.
Because the overall enrollment of this year’s entering freshman class is 11 percent larger than last year’s, the share of such students who are either black, Hispanic, or Native American dropped from 12.7 percent to 11.4 percent.
Moreover, throughout the entire student body, including graduate and professional schools, the actual number of black students declined by 3.3 percent and the number of Native American students declined by 1.2 percent .
The university took several steps to try to keep minority enrollments from dropping more than they actually did. Those included speeding up its admissions cycle to process as many applicants as possible before Proposal 2 took effect, greatly expanding its efforts to reach out to minority communities, and using computer-software programs that helped its admission office recruit a diverse pool of applicants. —Peter Schmidt
