University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Fall Farewell Issue 2017
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FALL FAREWELL 2017
GRAPHIC BY LAURA MAHONEY
Progress for whom?
Students grow impatient with stagnant diversity enrollment despite university’s largest class yet By Max Bayer SENIOR STAFF WRITER
The most recent freshman class at the University of WisconsinMadison was the largest in the school’s history. But a record number of underrepresented students decided to go elsewhere. In the fall 2017 class, there was a dip in the university’s yield rate — the percentage of students that enrolled out of the total students that were admitted — across virtually all underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. For all underrepresented students, known in the data as total minority students, the yield rate was 28.5 percent, the first time it dipped below 30 percent in the last 10 years. The yield rate for African-Americans dropped from 37.7 percent to 30.9 per-
cent. For white students, the rate was 39.7 percent, also a new low. However, 54.3 percent of underrepresented applicants were admitted, the highest percentage since 2009. AfricanAmericans specifically had a 39.4 percent acceptance rate, the largest over the 10 years of the data. According to Steve Hahn, vice provost for Enrollment Management, this year’s low yield rate in spite of a larger freshmen class can be largely attributed to this being UW-Madison’s first year on the Common App. The application allows prospective students to apply to numerous schools by answering additional questions instead of going to the UW System website for an entirely separate application.
“It makes it easier for the nonresidents to find us and it makes it easier to apply,” Hahn said. “That doesn’t mean they’re serious.” But junior and president of the Wisconsin Black Student Union Tashiana Lipscomb said the Common App reasoning seems like an excuse after numerous diversity crises, such as a spectator wearing a noose costume at Camp Randall Stadium and several incidents of anti-semitic vandalism, pushed campus climate issues to the forefront. She believes rather that prospective students realized UW-Madison may not be as progressive as they’ve heard after these incidents made their way around social media. “Now this liberal reputation that UW-Madison has already had, is starting to get attacked,” she said.
Campus enrollment shows weak recruitment progress, frustrates students of color For students of color on campus, the makeup of this class is all too familiar. Of the more than 6,600 new studentswelcomed onto campus, 17.6 percent were American students of color. In 2016, that population was 18.2 percent; in 2015, it was 16.1 percent. And as incidents of racial bias become more prevalent on campus, students’ patience has become strained. In a 2014 document, members of the university’s Ad Hoc Diversity Planning Committee recommended the university “continue to identify, recruit, and support promising applicants from diverse backgrounds.” According to the committee, one
of the long-term indicators of success would be if “students at UW-Madison are increasingly representative of multiple dimensions of diversity.” But the data shows that underrepresented enrollment has been stagnant. In the most recent campus climate survey results, more than 40 percent of students of color felt expected to represent the “point of view” of their identities in the classroom. Patrick Sims, vice provost of Diversity and Climate and Chief Diversity Officer, said this isn’t news. “We have a responsibility to be clear in what our students are going to be walking into,” Sims said, noting that Wisconsin is a predominantly white institution,
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“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”