Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Decline of ALANA more then a Black and White issue \

There is a real problem here at UMass: not only is there a decreasing number of ALANA students, but there also seems to be a refusal to address this worrying trend. Many factors need to be taken into account as to why this problem exists. However, the truth of the matter is that it all depends on whom you speak to.

ALANA includes all people of color, such as American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian, Pacific Islander, Non-Hispanic Black, Cape Verdean, Hispanic and Multi-racial students.

According to a Factbook, printed by the Office of Institutional Research (OIR), the numbers, and more importantly, the percentages of ALANA students at the University have taken a real dive over the past five years.

The total number of freshmen enrolled in Fall of 1996 was 3,985, and only 753 of those students, that is 18.9 percent, were ALANA students. The numbers dropped slightly with the freshmen class of 1997 where 696, or 18.6 percent of the students were ALANA out of a class of 3,737.

In the fall of 1998, the number of ALANA students took a dramatic plunge down to 16.9 percent of the freshmen class – only 655 students in a class of 3,866. Again in 1999, the numbers dropped to 605 ALANA students out of a class of 4,060 people. The total fell to only 14.9 percent.

With the most recent freshmen class in the Fall of 2000, the numbers have risen slightly to 15.4 percent of the class. But still, ALANA students only make up 573 students out of a class of 3,731 people.

Depending on whom you question, the causes for these low numbers and the recent drops in enrollment range from admissions standards to school expenses and family income, to SAT scores and high school GPAs, to imprecise data reporting to the fund cutting of certain programs, to recent legislative actions, to racism.

Dean of Enrollment Services Joseph Marshall explained how his department has had to bring in smaller freshmen classes recently in order to help keep the already quite large class size numbers from rising even more.

In doing so, he claimed that the numbers of all ethnicity groups have dropped, but the percentages have remained predominantly the same these past few years, averaging that ALANA students make up about 17 percent of the undergraduate student body when the percentages from all the classes are combined.

‘We first started to notice a major decline in ALANA students with the freshmen class in the fall of 1997 after the admissions requirements were first changed,’ Marshall said, ‘At that time, students had to have a higher GPA and SAT score as compared to past years in order to be accepted.’

In addition, Marshall mention that for freshmen entering this past fall, the University changed its requirements once again, setting the minimum high school GPA requirement at 2.0.

Since the average of the students’ high school GPAs has risen by only 0.07 points since the enactment of the new GPA requirement, one is left to question if the new guidelines truly did make much of a difference in enrollment, especially considering that ALANA students have risen in percentage this year, however slight that percentage may be.

In fact, one is left to wonder if the new GPA requirements left any effect upon students, for the average high school GPA among freshmen in the fall of 1998 to 1999 rose by 0.10 points without the aid of any official admissions action.

Director of the Office of ALANA Affairs Nelson Acosta believes the real issue lies within the admission process itself.

‘Over the past few years, admissions has changed their guidelines in order to be more fair,’ he said. ‘The question is: more fair to whom?’

Acosta recalled, ‘I worked in admissions for seven years [before the new requirements took affect], and I know that during that time, we would never accept students with less than a 2.0 high school GPA unless it was a very rare and special circumstance.’

He remarked how it bothers him to hear stereotypes claiming that ALANA students generally have lower grades and SAT scores than Non-Hispanic White students.

‘I know of many cases where non-ALANA students were accepted to the University as a special case when they did not meet all the criteria, such as students with endorsement letters from legislators or UMass alumni,’ he added.

While Acosta admitted that there are many considerations made during the admissions process, he adamantly remarked, ‘To say that the numbers of ALANA students have dropped because the minimum GPA was raised to a 2.0 is ridiculous.’

Marshall also worries that the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test (MCAS), the new standardized test that Massachusetts high school students need to pass in order to graduate, will take its toll among ALANA students’ numbers in next year’s freshmen class.

‘I’ve read in the newspapers every now and again that the MCAS failure rates among minorities are running high, so we’re not sure how the test will affect next year’s class,’ Marshall said.

However Acosta disputed, ‘Most students who’ll have trouble passing this test probably wouldn’t be admitted into the University anyway. It’s ridiculous to think that people of color aren’t qualified. To think that the percentage that won’t pass the test will affect the percentage of ALANA students’ enrollment is ludicrous.’

The issue at the heart of the matter remains who will have the access to best prepare for this standardized test. Acosta expressed his concerns that lower class students would be less prepared for the MCAS than upper and/or middle class ones, commenting that the main difference between a state and private school is access.

‘In our country, people of color in the middle class income bracket are a very low percent,’ he said, ‘and so everyone is not on a level playing field. If all schools had the same opportunities and provided the same education, it would be different. But everyone cannot get the same education because everyone cannot afford it.’

He also related this sentiment to the lack of UMass ALANA students in the first place.

‘Literally, we have very few poor students on this campus. Most come from middle class families or wealthier,’ Acosta said.

‘Recently, we’ve seen fewer students from working class families and families where parents don’t work or hold professional jobs,’ he added. ‘This has affected all working students as well, for a student’s family’s average income has become very high on this campus.’

Senior Rene Gonzalez agrees that money has much to do with the low percentage of ALANA students.

‘Based on the country’s demographics, many minorities fall into a lower income bracket, and the University has cut much of the funding for ALANA student programs, such as the English As a Second Language program, and the CEEBMS (Committee for the Collegiate Education of Black and other Minority Students) program,’ he said.

Gonzalez also reported that the University has recently cut many programs that helped student parents to attend college.

‘I think it forced around 805 student parents to leave the University [after cutting the program], many of which were ALANA students,’ he commented.

Both Acosta and Gonzalez believe that school expenses also have much to do with the ALANA decline in enrollment by forcing them to take out larger loans.

‘The University also recently cut wages of student jobs, such as part time salaries in the dining halls. For low income students, these jobs were a major source of income to help them pay for school,’ said Gonzalez.

According to Acosta, racism is another cause that keeps the ALANA numbers so low.

‘Our campus is very beautiful, but it is not always welcoming to ALANA people because over 80 percent of the student body is white,’ he said. ‘When students leave their homes, they leave behind their leave their families and support networks. This may bring stress to both white and ALANA students, but in addition to that ALANA students must also deal w
ith racism and peoples’ ignorance towards people of color.’

Another factor to examine is the diversity of different ethnicities among acceptance rates vs. the enrollment rates, for according to the OIR Factbook, there has been a decline in acceptance rates for all ALANA students. In 1997, 81.6 percent of the ALANA applicants were accepted, whereas in 1999 that percentage dropped to only 61.2 percent.

In particular, there has been a dramatic decline in Non-Hispanic Black, Cape Verdean, and Hispanic students’ acceptance rates from 1997 to 1999, while American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian, Pacific Islander, and non-Hispanic white students’ acceptance rates have remained relatively the same during those years.

For example, 77.0 percent of all non-Hispanic Black applicants for the freshman class of fall 1997 were accepted, but only 46.3 percent of those applicants were accepted for the freshmen class of fall 1999.

However, this dramatic drop was not common among all ethnicities, for 85.0 percent of all Asian and Pacific Islander students applying for the freshmen class of Fall 1997 were accepted. That percentage only slightly decreased with the applicants for the freshmen class of fall 1999 with 80.0 percent.

Non-Hispanic White students hardly saw any loss in acceptance rates from applicants for the freshmen class of fall 1997, where 71.8 percent were accepted, to applicants for the freshmen class of fall 1999, where 70.8 percent were accepted.

Marshall said that any major drops in acceptance rates, thus affecting drops in enrollment rates, during this time was a result from the 1998 Boston Latin court case, where a federal court declared that a race-based policy used to admit students into schools is unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, the percentage of accepted students who actually enrolled at the University has remained relatively steady from 1997 to 1999 among students all ethnicities, ranging around 29-33 percent.

Accounting for why so many accepted students fail to enroll at UMass, Marshall explained, ‘We’re a ‘safety net’ school for ALANA students with a high academic record who have many options open to them.’

Marshall also noted that some of the collected data presented in the OIR Factbook does not paint a completely accurate picture due to the fact that not all students report their ethnicity, and with the exception to the freshmen class in the Fall of 2000, that number of students has been rising over the past five years.

In the fall of 1996, 302 freshmen, or 7.6 percent of the class, did not identify their ethnicity. That number rose with the freshmen class in the fall of 1997 and continued to rise in 1998 where 10.1 percent of the class did not distinguish their ethnicity. That percentage remained at 10.1 in the fall of 1999 with 411 unidentified freshmen.

According to Marshall, one reason the ‘not reporting’ numbers had been rising prior to the fall of 2000 is due to the fact that the University only offered six categories for which a student could choose their ethnicity.

He noted, ‘People don’t always fit neatly into those boxes, and so in that case, they don’t fill in their ethnicity.’

The question was then as to whether or not adding more options to the application would solve the problem. For example, on the Census 2000 Questionnaire, Americans were given fifteen different choices of ethnicity with which they could identify.

However, Sandra Trautz a junior, Eurasian student here at UMass, does not believe that adding more choices to the application form would cause more students to report their ethnicity.

As a Chinese, Cuban, German, and Italian female whose facial features look as though she could check the ‘Non-Hispanic White’ box, she commented, ‘Where would anyone intend to start if more boxes were to be added to the application? For you couldn’t be accurate without taking up pages and pages.’

Trautz believes that it is even more offensive to try and show how ‘accurately’ someone could make an application, because they would definitely fall short of many types of people.

‘What do you say when you’re mixed? How would anyone adjust for that? By adding more titles? Some may prefer it [more ethnicity choices], but I’d prefer marking ‘Other’,’ she noted.

Students were originally asked to identify themselves as a Non-Latino Black, a Cape Verdean, a Latino, a North or South American Indian/Alaskan, a Non-Latino White, or an Asian/Pacific Islander student on freshmen admission applications.

However, recently students were given a seventh option of Multiracial and able to write in which group they identify themselves with most.

‘The problem we’ve seen so far is that we get responses that don’t fit into the other six categories (European and Indian for example). If they say which, and they fit into one of the other six, we then make a judgment as to how to code them based on info in the rest of the application,’ Marshall said. ‘It’s certainly not an exact science, but it does seem to be helping somewhat. The larger issue is still that some increasing numbers do not specify anything.’

The Multiracial option may explain why more people opted to report their ethnicity in the freshmen class of fall 2000. A total of 276 freshmen, only 7.4 percent of the class, did not. It could also possibly account for the slight rise in numbers of ALANA students in this year’s freshmen class.

However, Acosta disagreed, ‘While people of mixed race usually put Other, finding people from mixed backgrounds is not the norm. The sad part is that we’re still a pretty segregated society, and interracial relationships are still pretty rare.’

He believes most people of color are willing to identify their ethnicity, and those who conceal it are not always ALANA students. Acosta explained how people sometimes try to make excuses to hide away the racism in our society.

‘People want to deal with this situation like it doesn’t exist, but if you walk around this campus, you can see the plain reality that there are just not many ALANA students here,’ he added.

‘We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go too,’ said Acosta, ‘In not having many ALANA students on campus, white students are hurt by not being able to learn about people from other cultures and backgrounds, and ALANA students miss out on great opportunities at this campus.’

He then paused and looked out the window at the snow floating down from the sky during the start of Monday afternoon’s snowstorm.

‘I wonder how many people are seeing a snowstorm for the first time today,’ he said transfixed by the winter wonderland scene. ‘How many people from the South or other countries would never have seen it if they hadn’t had the chance come to this University?’

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