Whittier College Program Bridging the Gulf to Blacks : Project That Targets Inner-City Los Angeles Seeks to Staunch Falling Minority Enrollment

Thelma Eaton has built bridges before.

But spanning the distance between Whittier College and the troubled streets of South-Central Los Angeles may be her toughest undertaking yet.

Raised and educated in the Deep South, Eaton believes that the children of Watts belong in college, especially small, liberal-arts institutions like Whittier.

So 17 years after she broke the color barrier at Whittier and became the first black professor on campus, she is working some of Los Angeles’ roughest neighborhoods to spread the word about higher education and Whittier College.

She calls her crusade the Crosstown Project.

Through workshops, field trips and counseling sessions, Eaton hopes to persuade students and their parents at six predominantly black South-Central high schools and junior highs of the value of attending college.

And if they eventually choose Whittier College, all the better.

Whittier College is struggling to boost its sagging black enrollment.

Black Enrollment Down From 1977

At a time when the college has become a magnet for Latinos, boasting one of the highest percentages of Latino students among California’s 123 public and private four-year schools, black enrollment on campus has fallen from a high of 104 in 1977. This fall, among Whittier’s 1,100 students, only 41 are black, and 1986 marks the ninth straight year black enrollment has declined at the century-old college.

The reasons for this trend are varied and reach well beyond Whittier into the very neighborhoods and schools of black Los Angeles that Eaton has targeted.

Across California, many private colleges and universities are reporting a drop in black enrollment, and experts blame, among other things, the high cost of education and the lure of the job market.

Unlike a decade ago, educators say, the drive today among many blacks, especially males, is to get out of high school and go to work. Only one-third of Whittier College’s blacks are males.

“Immediate gratification is the thing these days,” said Eaton, a professor of social work who has taken a year’s leave of absence to coordinate the Crosstown Project.

“In my day, it was not a matter of whether you were going to college, but where,” she said. “ . . . But now it’s ‘How much can I make when I get out of high school?’ ”

Another hurdle for blacks at Whittier is the price tag. Annual tuition is now $8,600, and when books, student fees and room and board are added it can run as much as $12,800 a year, Whittier College spokesman Donald Stewart said. Three out of four Whittier students, including most blacks on campus, receive some type of financial aid.

Attending a four-year school has become a “difficult economic choice” for blacks, said Hans Giesecke, assistant vice president of the Assn. of Independent California Colleges and Universities. Many blacks, he said, are under increasing pressure from family and friends to step straight into the workplace after high school. Based on 1985 enrollment figures, a growing number of blacks are just not going to private colleges in California. Among 80,775 undergraduates at the association’s 62 member schools, only 6% were black, down from a high of about 8% in the late 1970s. Statewide, blacks make up 7.9% of the population, according to 1980 census figures.

At the state’s two public university systems, the picture is a little brighter.

Within the nine-campus University of California, black enrollment has gone from a low in 1980 of 3,474, or 3.9% of 89,516 undergraduates, to 4,441 blacks, or 4.3% of 103,865 undergraduates last year.

On the 19 state university campuses, including the one in Long Beach, black enrollment has hovered around 5.5% since the mid-1970s. At Long Beach last year, about 5.6% of the 32,519 undergraduates were black.

Because fewer blacks are attending private colleges, the competition for those who are college-bound has intensified as small schools like Whittier try to out-recruit the Stanfords and Harvards of the land.

Reputations Carry the Day

“Those institutions with the best reputations and biggest name recognition are doing well, and will continue to do well at the expense of smaller schools,” Giesecke said.

Stanford University, for example, has nearly 6,500 undergraduates, with a black enrollment of 8%, a figure that has actually gone up slightly in recent years.

When it comes to attracting blacks, Whittier College has another problem: its image.

Although the campus is less than 20 miles from a string of black communities, Whittier College officials acknowledge that some blacks have no idea where the school is. And those who know cling to the misconceptions that it is either all-white or a two-year college, officials say.

“There are some blacks,” Eaton said, “that think Whittier is a community college for rich kids in Orange County.”

It’s an easy mistake to make considering the city of Whittier’s demographics.

According to the 1980 census, less than 1% of Whittier’s 69,717 residents were black, and nearly half of the city’s 393 blacks were at Fred C. Nelles School, a correctional facility for juvenile offenders on Whittier Boulevard. While nearly one-quarter of the city is now Latino, it is still predominantly white.

“Coming from a black environment, Whittier can be intimidating for some,” said Andrea Shorter, a junior at Whittier College and president of the Black Collegiate Assn., a black student organization on campus. “This is a pretty suburban area with conservative values. It takes time to adjust.”

On recruiting trips, Bruce Walker, one of Whittier College’s admissions counselors, said black high school students usually ask about the ethnic makeup of the school’s enrollment. But he added that it is not an overriding concern for most.

“They want to get a flavor of the campus,” he said. “But like most kids, the bottom line is, they want to know if they can have fun at Whittier. . . . and I tell them we’re 30 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, the beach and Disneyland.”

Shorter, who went to high school in Perris, south of Riverside, said she has felt comfortable since the day she arrived on campus three years ago. Despite offers from bigger schools, she wanted to attend Whittier because of its small class sizes and easy access to faculty.

‘Friendly and Outgoing’

“Sure, I noticed there weren’t many black students on campus,” said Shorter, a sociology major who eventually wants to teach on the college level and serve as a role model for other minorities. “But the blacks I met were very friendly and outgoing. They were involved. They weren’t outcasts.”

Recognizing the problem of low black enrollment, Whittier officials began huddling two years ago to discuss ways to attract more blacks.

One plan that was eventually rejected, Eaton said, was to bring to Whittier blacks who were high school seniors elsewhere, house them on campus and enroll them in local schools. This way, they could ease into college life, and adjust to the conservative character of suburban Whittier while still in high school. But this approach was deemed by campus administrators, and Eaton herself, as too disruptive for the student and his family, and posed logistical and economic problems for the college as well.

So Eaton and Katie Murphy, the college’s director of admissions, countered with the Crosstown Project.

With the administration’s blessing and a $52,000 grant from the Educational Foundation of America, Eaton put the program in motion this summer. It attacks the problem both in the classrooms of six South-Central schools and on the Whittier campus itself, where Eaton contends that black students need a stronger network of support.

Eaton’s aim is to reach younger students: the eighth-, ninth- and 10th-graders at the three high schools--Jordan, Crenshaw and Washington Preparatory--and three junior high schools--Markham, Bret Harte and Audubon. The key, Eaton said, is to expose students to college when they are young. By a student’s junior year, she said, it is too late to take courses needed for college or improve grades to acceptable standards. Getting to students early, she said, gives “us the chance to plant the seeds about college before it’s too late.”

Course Selections Can Hurt

Murphy, a 1975 graduate of Whittier College, said too often the wrong course selection, even in junior high school, can hurt a student’s chances of getting into college. But, she added, students cannot be expected to make the decision alone.

“Parents must play a big, big role,” Murphy said. “For example, a student given the choice of auto mechanics or typing may take auto mechanics. It’s more attractive, more practical, when the goal is to make some quick money.

“But if that student wants to get to go college, he’s going to need to know how to type,” she said. “That’s why parents must step in and be a guiding influence.”

Beginning this month, Eaton will meet with 30 to 40 of the top students and their parents from each of the six schools to explain the Crosstown Project. Topics such as course requirements, scholarships and life on a college campus will be discussed. During the school year, those same students will travel with Eaton to various cultural events in Los Angeles, as well as visit several colleges to meet students and faculty there.

The project has Hal Kimbell, principal at Markham, excited.

“For once,” he said recently, “someone is coming to us, coming right to our doorstep here in Watts to try and help.”

Many of Markham’s 1,500 students come from four major housing projects within blocks of campus. The campus is neat and tidy, but the world outside the barbed-wire-topped fence that surrounds the school grounds is not. Armed school security officers patrol the streets around Markham, and police say drugs and gangs are plentiful in the area.

“Many of our students have never really been outside this neighborhood,” said Kimbell, a 30-year veteran of Los Angeles public schools. “They need exposure. They need to know there is opportunity out there. I think the Crosstown Project may bridge that gap.”

While Eaton said that recruiting for Whittier College is not the primary thrust of the project, many of those young blacks will be brought to the hillside campus for a look around.

What they will find is a student body that is roughly 70% white, and a faculty to match. Among the 82 full-time faculty members, 10 are minorities, including three who are black, three Asian and four Latino. A third of the faculty is female.

Latino students account for 20% of the enrollment, Asians 5% and blacks less than 4%.

Campus officials point out that several steps were taken to improve the black enrollment picture before the Crosstown Project got rolling.

A year ago, Walker, who is black, was added to the admissions staff. He has traveled to three special college fairs for black high school students in New York, Philadelphia and Denver. He is also the adviser to Whittier College’s Black Collegiate Assn., and is generally credited by the group’s student leaders with pumping new life into the organization, which has been overshadowed in recent years by a similar but much larger and more active Latino student group on campus.

The admissions office also began taking special note last year of all inquiries from blacks about the college, following up with phone calls and extra mailings, Murphy said.

The effort, she said, has paid dividends. Nineteen blacks enrolled at Whittier this year, compared to only 11 in fall, 1985.

“It’s not like we said, ‘We need this many more black students, so let’s go get them,’ ” Murphy said. “There are no quotas here, and there never have been. But we are aware of the numbers and are interested in making gains. . . .”

As part of the Crosstown Project, Eaton said, more attention will paid to blacks on campus to help ensure that those already enrolled graduate.

Successful Support System

One big reason Latinos have flocked to Whittier is the on-campus Center of Mexican-American Affairs, a special office that, under the hand of its director, Martin Ortiz, has proven highly successful in building a support system for Latino students.

Borrowing a page from Ortiz’s approach, Eaton said, she will assume the role of unofficial adviser for black students, especially when it comes to family matters. She plans to periodically call parents of black students, and eventually publish and mail home a newsletter about events on campus.

“It is critical to work with parents so they won’t sabotage the youngsters by discouraging them from continuing their education,” Eaton said. “Some of those parents never had the chance to go college, so they don’t understand the anxiety of taking an exam or writing a paper. I want to help them understand, so they support their children.”

With a doctorate in gerontology and social work from USC, Eaton is a natural at her work. Her grounding in human behavior came as the daughter of a Methodist minister growing up on the same block in New Orleans with Italians, Irish and Jews. She said her father never allowed her three brothers to work outside the home, saying, “It gets in the way of your education.”

Like her father, Eaton now preaches the virtues of an education, and she delivers her message with a personal touch, an approach that has become one of Whittier College’s most effective recruiting tools.

Just ask Brock Fowler, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. He had already decided to come West to Whittier College, when he got a call from Murphy the summer before his freshman year.

“She said she was in Chicago and wanted to have lunch and talk,” recalled Fowler, now a junior majoring in business administration. “She wanted to make sure I was comfortable with my decision and answer any questions. I was impressed.”

BLACK UNDERGRADUATES

Changes in black enrollment at Whittier College since 1977.

Number of Total Percentage of Year black students enrollment black students 1977 104 1,065 9.8 1978 103 1,074 9.6 1979 92 1,055 8.7 1980 82 1,037 7.9 1981 Figures not available 1982 72 966 7.4 1983 68 974 7.0 1984 55 980 5.6 1985 44 1,050 4.2 1986 41 1,110 3.7