While issues surrounding diversity in higher education spur national debate, the Cornell Graduate School continues to recruit and retain some of the most qualified ethnic minorities and women by cultivating a basic idea: Personal relationships, not target numbers, make the difference.
In recruiting, those personal relationships extend from one-on-one meetings with prospective students to ongoing collaborations with schools across the nation that feed well-qualified students to many of Cornell's 94 major graduate fields.
"Repeatedly, students who had not initially thought of Cornell became interested in us because of our interest in talking to them," said Terry Plater, the Graduate School's associate dean for academic affairs.
A relationship with the University of Puerto Rico, built over many years, has brought consistently large numbers of successful applicants, especially in engineering fields. A similar relationship with the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers in Andover, Mass., has fed large numbers of highly skilled applicants to the humanities fields.
Overall, the Graduate School participates in a wide range of recruitment events annually; provides supplementary fellowship support for entering and continuing underrepresented students nominated by their fields; encourages faculty-student links in research; supports academic events that facilitate collegial relationships across ethnic, racial and disciplinary boundaries; and continually studies alternative approaches to recruitment in order to identify the most successful practices.
With that, the Graduate School has consistently combined a respect for research and learning with a commitment to making opportunities available to all promising applicants. More and more, in the context of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, this is understood to include anyone with a history of overcoming disadvantage.
The efforts have helped boost enrollment of underrepresented minority students in recent years. In 2003, the number of underrepresented minority students enrolled in master's degree and Ph.D. programs at Cornell reached 312, almost seven percent of the total graduate student population (and just over 11 percent of the U.S. graduate student population). In fall 2004, 88 underrepresented minority students were admitted to Cornell graduate degree programs.
Funding support has been critical to these successes. Fellowship support has been maintained at a high level in recent years, especially for Ph.D. students. Despite a highly competitive environment, the Graduate School has met its goal of providing fellowship support to all entering and continuing underrepresented Ph.D. students who were nominated by their fields.
Retaining students through the successful completion of their degree programs is an equally important part of the commitment to diversity and so, once underrepresented students are admitted, the Graduate School works to create an atmosphere of support. Whether they meet informally with faculty at the Big Red Barn, gather in larger numbers at forums featuring Toni Morrison, Janet Reno and other guest speakers, or take part in specially tailored events that respond to their changing needs, students find they have a lot in common and a lot to share.
Retention also is targeted by working with faculty and fields to identify and remove subtle but nonetheless real institutional and idiosyncratic barriers to students' success.
All these efforts complement each other, and together they will make a difference in the recruitment and retention of racial and ethnic minorities, women and other underrepresented students in the future. Despite the achievements driven by the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ending racial segregation in public schools, equitable access to graduate education continues to be an elusive goal.
"While our successes can still be considered modest in terms of our goals, the Graduate School is proud of what has been accomplished so far," said Plater. "We are enthusiastic about building on our achievements, and we recognize there's much more to be done."
Graduate school recruitment and retention activities for underrepresented students are shared by the entire graduate school staff; however, the office of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs is the locus of recruitment and retention activities. Contact Plater at grad_assoc_ dean@cornell.edu with questions or suggestions.
The Diversity Digest is one of the services provided by the university's Diversity Council. For information about the council, this column, the council's newsletter or about diversity initiatives at Cornell, contact co-chairs Robert L. Harris Jr., vice provost for diversity and faculty development, at 255-5358 or rlh10@cornell.edu, or Lynette Chappell-Williams, director of the Office of Workforce Diversity, Equity and Life Quality, at 255-3976 or lc75@cornell.edu.
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