Cornell Deputy Provost David Harris, a sociologist, cited a troubling national statistic at a two-day conference in New York City, Oct. 2: About 75 percent of white and Asian students who enroll in degree programs earn a college degree within six years. But, "For blacks and Latinos, it's fewer than half."

The conference, "Closing the Minority Achievement Gap in Higher Education," explored strategies for improving retention and achievement among minority college students. Attended by educators from leading universities and liberal arts colleges, the event was sponsored by Cornell, the Teagle Foundation and Credit Suisse, which hosted the event at its Madison Avenue offices.

The conference grew out of a 2005 project sponsored by the Teagle Foundation in which a team of administrators from Cornell, Colgate University, Hamilton College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Wells College, led by Harris, surveyed diversity programs at 43 leading liberal arts colleges and universities. The white paper they produced identified 14 of these programs as particularly promising. Four of these programs will be introduced at Cornell this year, and each was the subject of an Oct. 3 workshop.

Harris said the focus is on "college completion and achievement. Not admission, not K through 12, but what happens once students get there."

"The goal of diversity in higher education ... is not merely to admit diverse classes," Harris said. "The goal is to produce graduating classes that are diverse with respect to race and ethnicity, but not with respect to skill. Race and ethnicity should not predict skill among graduating classes. In that sense, admitting a diverse cohort is a necessary -- but not sufficient -- condition for achieving our goals."

Even controlling for SAT scores, high school grade point average and socio-economic status "can't make those black/white differences, especially in college GPA, go away," Harris said. "They persist. ... there's something going on in the college years that's important."

Ongoing assessment is crucial to the success of programs aimed at eliminating the achievement gap, Harris said. "Diversity programs are extremely political, extremely sensitive. What works at Cornell may not work at Wells [College]. We tried to lay a road map for some things that might work."

Teagle Foundation Vice President Donna Heiland agreed. "I think the more we move forward with a culture of evidence behind us, the stronger our arguments are going to be," she said.

President David Skorton said that much work remains at Cornell, even though the university has been devoted to providing access for all students since its founding. "Yet we have approximately the same proportion of African-American students in 2007 that we had in 1986," he said.

In his keynote address, University of Maryland-Baltimore County President Freeman Hrabowski III, who is credited with dramatically improving academic achievement among blacks and Latino students at his institution, said that involving senior faculty directly with students leads to greater achievement, and that first-generation college students, regardless of ethnic background, benefit from additional support. He discussed the strategies that have helped undergraduate minority students from UMBC go on to succeed at some of the nation's top Ph.D. and medical programs. He also stressed the importance of a "strength-based model," which inspires students to pursue excellence.

"I hope we all return to campus with a renewed commitment to invest in the financial -- and at least as important -- the political capital required to address these issues," Harris said.