I-200 didn't erase color on state's college campuses
And it includes Aaron Midkiff, a gifted African American so heavily recruited by colleges that his mother designated an entire wall of their house to collect his mail. He rejected a historically black college in favor of the University of Washington, lured, in part, by a four-year "Diversity" scholarship.
The pair, and thousands like them, are evidence that Initiative 200, which Washington voters passed in 1998, didn't cause a precipitous drop in minority enrollment at the state's colleges and universities.
Indeed, at the University of Washington and Washington State University, the state's largest institutions, the number of minorities enrolling as freshmen has actually grown.
That doesn't mean I-200 didn't change things.
To counter an initial dip in minority enrollment, colleges have used privately funded scholarships and creative recruitment efforts to lure the best and brightest.
At the UW, an admissions essay bypasses race but tries to "tease out" diversity by asking about life experiences. So while I-200 rendered admissions colorblind, it also may have made college officials even more aware of race and ethnicity.
That leaves both fans and foes of the measure claiming victory.
But the battle over race continues. Proponents of affirmative action worry that colleges now will chase the top minorities but ignore diamonds in the rough who deserve a chance.
And those who helped abolish racial preferences charge that the new cultural awareness essay is an end run around the law.
Chasing diversity
Put yourself in the shoes of a college administrator screening 15,000 applicants — for 5,000 available spots.
How do you choose?
Since the civil-rights movement forced open the doors of higher education to those long locked out, one criterion has been race.
Court orders compelled some schools in the South to increase minority numbers. But some states, including Washington, embraced diversity as a goal.
The UW was especially aggressive. In 1968, it created the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), which accepted minority and low-income students despite low grades. The aim: to create a campus that more closely mirrored the state's general population.
Between 1983 and the mid-1990s, an estimated 8,100 racial minorities entered the UW through this affirmative-action program. But in 1997, partly in response to claims that such programs encouraged reverse discrimination, the UW dropped EOP and instead screened for unique background characteristics, including race.
That change came amid a heated national debate about affirmative action. In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, pioneering a movement to abolish racial preferences.
Prop 209 champion Ward Connerly, a black businessman and University of California regent, then marched his campaign north to Washington.
In November 1998, three of five voters here endorsed I-200, which was promoted as a civil-rights measure that eliminated racial preferences in public employment, contracting and college admissions.
The 'discouragement effect'
A year later, minority enrollment at UW and WSU fell sharply.
At the UW, the number of Latino, Native American and black freshmen dropped from 373 to 255 — the only decline in seven years. (The UW doesn't consider Asians as underrepresented because of their high numbers.)
At WSU, the number of Latino, Native, black and Asian students dropped from 396 to 284.
But tighter admission criteria weren't keeping minorities out. Rather, fewer minorities were applying in the first place.
I-200 created a "discouragement effect" among minorities, according to a study by UW sociologists Susan Weirzbicki and Charles Hirschman.
"It made them think minorities aren't welcome," Hirschman says. "It's not that the university was saying not to come here. But it was in their (student) unconsciousness."
That perception was one officials should have worked harder to dispel, says Milton Lang, special assistant to the WSU president. "When you're of the majority population, you don't feel left out," Lang says. "When you're a student of color, it's a different take."
Fearing an echo of the California experience — where minority numbers plummeted after Prop 209 — college officials here stepped up recruitment efforts.
WSU started reaching out beyond Pullman into the heavily Latino Yakima Valley. This fall, the number of minority freshmen is 410, or 15 percent of the incoming class. That's a 44 percent increase since 1999.
Recruiters from Eastern Washington University in Cheney catered to various cultures. For example, because Latino parents often want children, especially daughters, to stay close to home, recruiters made sure to court parents as well.
Ellensburg's Central Washington University concentrated on smaller schools in Ephrata, Warden and Connell. Last spring, recruiter Mike Reilly made his annual trek to the Hispanic Achievement Banquet in Yakima. Reilly had long been the only recruiter at the event. This year, there were eight.
At the UW, full-time admissions counselors were assigned to minority neighborhoods in Seattle, Tacoma, Wenatchee and the Yakima Valley. A fleet of student ambassadors, mostly students of color, were sent out to talk up the school at community festivals. And black faculty members drummed up business through visits to community centers: First AME Church, the African American Academy, the Royal Esquire Club.
"We talked to students and parents and they said they didn't feel very welcomed," says Ernie Dunston, president of a Seattle black business group that spearheaded the recruiting forums. "So we thought the U should do untraditional recruiting."
The efforts may be paying off.
This fall's freshman class at the UW includes 138 African Americans — still only 3 percent of the incoming class but the highest number in a decade.
The number of Hispanic freshmen, which had been steadily climbing, actually dipped a bit, from 193 to 178 this fall. And the number of Native American freshmen inched to 59 enrolled this year.
But combined, black, Hispanic and Native American students make up 8 percent of the UW's 2002 freshman class — a figure that has averaged 7 percent for the past decade.
That enrollment still lags behind the statewide population, where 12 percent of high-school graduates are black, Hispanic and Native American.
'Don't need it'
Amanda Garcia was not quite 15 when I-200 passed. She still can't tell you exactly what the law says.
But she knew what affirmative action was — and she opposed it. When 160 fellow students at Sunnyside High School in the Yakima Valley demonstrated against I-200 in 1998, she declined to join them.
"Minorities don't need it," says Garcia, now 19. "It's just instilled that they can't do it on their own and that they need help."
Garcia is the oldest daughter of a chiropractor's assistant and a self-employed construction/maintenance worker. Although neither of her parents graduated from college, she needed a degree to fulfill her dream of being a doctor, lawyer or teacher. At Sunnyside High, she served as student representative on the school board, was a cheerleader and played tennis — activities that could help earn a scholarship.
She graduated with a 3.57 grade-point average and scored 1,080 out of a possible 1,600 on her SATs. She found the UW too big and Eastern too small, so settled on WSU.
"I really thought WSU had more diversity than it does," she says. "It's OK, though."
On forms, Garcia identifies herself as Latino/Chicano. But she hasn't seen the need to join Latino student clubs or get caught up in "brown pride," as she calls it. And she cringes when other students assume she got special consideration for financial aid. Under I-200, public scholarships or grants can't be race-based.
"It gets thrown in my face a lot," she says. "I would feel really bad if I got (something) because of my ethnicity. I don't know what would make me better to get that money more than the next person."
Garcia supports herself with a WSU scholarship, private scholarships, a work-study grant and a $5,000 loan. She's also looking for a part-time job.
Elite scholarships
Aaron Midkiff, 19, is the youngest son of a retired airport-maintenance worker and a department-store-goods' distributor, neither of whom attended college.
He always had "a serious fear of falling behind" in school. So even in the laissez faire of adolescence, where basketball often is celebrated more than grades, Midkiff put academics first.
"I saw some people who did lay back and I saw how they just stayed there," he says. "I didn't want to end up like them."
Midkiff graduated from Rainier Beach High with a 3.79 grade-point average. His SAT score was 1,160, making him prime college material.
As such, he represents the flip side of the post-I-200 coin: since colleges can't give special consideration to less-qualified minorities, they compete for the best — sometimes with money.
Costco Chairman Jeff Brotman, a UW regent, and Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, a trustee at Seattle University, last year teamed to create Diversity scholarships. The program has since expanded to WSU. Since the scholarships are privately funded, the racial preference doesn't violate I-200.
"We wanted to keep the best and the brightest at home and figured this was one way," Brotman says.
UW Diversity scholarships, covering full tuition for four years, were awarded last year to 73 minority applicants with exemplary grades and test scores. Another 62 have been given this year. The money helped land Midkiff at UW. An aspiring engineer, he was turned down by MIT and Stanford. But three historically black colleges and the UW offered him admission.
Midkiff wasn't keen on the UW. He once took a Web class there during high school and was stopped by campus police while walking through campus. A crime had been reported and officers said he matched descriptions of the suspect. He was questioned in full view of a busload of people.
But UW officials offered him a Diversity scholarship — more than any competing school. Richard McCormick, UW president at the time, invited Midkiff to breakfast and apologized for the police incident.
He knew he would be entering a world that is still largely white.
But the real world, he notes, "isn't going to be all-black. This gives me a taste of real life."
Life as diversity
That "real-life" experience, education officials say, is why diversity matters.
"Everybody gets a better education when they go to school with people who aren't like themselves," says McCormick, who recently was named president of Rutgers University. "They're readier for the real world."
Colleges nationwide are using admissions practices to scan for all types of diversity. The UW uses a "comprehensive review." Students whose grades and test scores meet minimum requirements are automatically admitted. The UW then reviews the remaining pool of applicants, rating them on academics (example: how rigorous was their course schedule?) and on personal essays that reveal character: defining moments, hardships, cultural awareness.
"What we want to do is find out what this person brings," explains Tim Washburn, the UW's director of admissions. "Are they first-generation? Are they low-income? Did they graduate from a school where more than one-third of the students were on free or reduced lunches?"
Washburn dismisses complaints that the review works against successful kids with privileged upbringing. Such "perfect" kids, he says, are already getting in.
And, he points out, cultural awareness doesn't necessarily mean race. "It means having thoughtfully thought about cultural differences," he says. It could include volunteering as a missionary or living abroad.
Even so, the life "hardships" assessed in the essays — poverty, language barriers, little family history of education — tend to be more common to some racial or ethnic groups than others.
This fall's admissions data for in-state freshmen confirm an overwhelming majority of black, Native, Hawaiian and Latino students — and a slightly higher percentage of Asian students — were admitted through comprehensive review.
College recruiters work hard these days to remind prospective students that less-than-stellar grades won't prevent admission to the UW. When Native American teens from Whatcom County visited UW recently, admissions officials encouraged them to draw on their cultural experiences.
"They said not to just say 'powwow' but say what it did for you," says Beth Boyd, a program director at Northwest Indian College.
Jackie Lewis, assistant principal at Evergreen High in the Highline School District, pushes the essays with his students.
"I think a kid has to sell himself or herself," he says. "There are little flags that a university can pick up on."
WSU also now requires applicants to submit a "personal statement."
But opponents of race-based preferences are watching carefully for signs that officials are skirting the laws.
The Pacific Legal Foundation continues to lobby against the University of California's comprehensive-review admissions process, which screens for "hardship" factors.
"They're trying to end run around the civil rights initiative," said foundation attorney Sharon Brown. "Are they using this merely as a proxy for race?"
Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com
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