Eastern Colleges : Recruiters Offer West a Taste of Ivy

“Look at me!” Amparo Gonzalez urged the students at Huntington Park High, an overwhelmingly Latino school south of downtown Los Angeles. “Do I look like a snob, a preppie?”

Two years of study at Princeton University had not made her forget her roots in East Los Angeles, said Gonzalez, dressed in a style more Brooklyn Avenue than Ivy League. So get over your fears about snooty Easterners, cold weather, high costs and being too far away from family, she said. Apply to Princeton.

Besides, said the junior sociology major who was born in Mexico, if you ever need a break from the gentility at the central New Jersey campus, the lively streets of Manhattan and Philadelphia are an easy train ride away. “When I get tired of the trees and need some graffiti in my life, I just go to New York,” she joked.

A Working Vacation

With air fare home paid by Princeton, Gonzalez visited Huntington Park and gave similar talks at 21 other Southern California high schools during a recent vacation. In the same week, seven other Princeton students and two professional admissions counselors toured the area, all looking for possible members of Princeton’s Class of 1993.

Princeton’s effort to boost the number of admission applications from California was ambitious, but it was not unique. East Coast colleges, even extremely selective Ivy League institutions like Princeton, fear a drop in the number of college-age students from their traditional New England and Mid-Atlantic drawing pools. So, they are heating up their recruiting efforts in the Southwest, particularly the urban centers of California, where immigration is counteracting the “baby bust.”

“People are looking at the decline in high school populations back East and if you really want to continue to attract the high quality of students, you broaden the base,” said Ronn Beck, who moved to Sherman Oaks last year to begin a full-time admissions program on the West Coast for Clark University of Worcester, Mass.

Ethnic Attraction

Another big attraction is California’s ethnic mix, especially its rising numbers of Latinos and Asians. “Colleges have been under increasing pressure to increase minority enrollments,” explained Sally Reed, editor of College Bound, an Evanston, Ill.-based newsletter which deals with college admissions issues. “It makes sense to go to Los Angeles where they would find a greater racial diversity than in their own back yard.”

Plus, Eastern schools are trying to tap the nostalgia that the many Eastern-educated transplants to California feel and may pass on to their college-age children. Ivy League recruiters subtly play on some Californians’ feelings, warranted or not, of cultural inferiority and desire for a taste of life in the Boston-to-Washington corridor. And, high school counselors complain, children of successful college-educated parents feel more pressure than ever to gain admission into famous-name schools--and many of those schools are in the East.

In addition to Clark, Boston University, Cornell University, Swarthmore College and University of Pennsylvania have stationed admissions officers full time in California over the past few years. Many other colleges have stepped up their number of visits to California high schools and college fairs. Unsolicited mailings to promising students and flashy videotapes sent to guidance counselors are increasingly used to sell colleges in ways that were not necessary during the school years of the baby boomers. Some colleges even fly applicants back East for a campus tour.

“Cornell is 3,000 miles away and it is awfully easy for Californians and Westerners to lose sight of the university,” said Cornell’s Bill Cox, explaining why he has an office in Solana Beach in San Diego County.

Success in Numbers

Partly as a result of such marketing, Eastern schools report success in attracting more Californians. They expect to see that trend continue as this year’s application deadlines pass over the next few weeks.

For example, the University of Pennsylvania has seen the number of its California freshman increase from 23 to 181 in the past decade, while overall enrollment has remained stable at the Philadelphia school. At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the number of applications from California more than tripled in the same time, far outpacing the big increase in all applicants produced, in part, by publicity about basketball championships.

At Yale University, California freshmen began to outnumber contingents from such traditional Ivy League feeder states as Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the early 1980s and now are second to New York.

“There’s no question that there has been a big change,” said Worth David, dean of Yale’s undergraduate admissions, who added that lower air fares due to deregulation aided the recruiting.

However, Eastern institutions clearly have a lot of work ahead of them if they are to glean more of the students from California. They also face more efforts by California schools such as Stanford University and Pomona College to attract young people from all over the nation.

Few Go Out of State

Because California’s strong public university systems offer bargain-rate educations, the state sends only about 5% of its residents to out-of-state colleges, the U.S. Department of Education reports. The nationwide rate is 15%, and some Eastern states, such as New Jersey and Vermont, export more than 35% of their college freshmen.

The tradition of staying in-state is reinforced by Cal Grants, the state scholarships that can be used only at public or private institutions in California. And, of course, travel costs are kept lower by enrolling near home.

Well-endowed private colleges say they offer generous scholarships and loans that can make their costs competitive. Princeton, for example, boasts that more than 40% of its undergraduates receive financial aid and that 70% of the average award is an outright grant. Nevertheless, the $13,380 annual tuition at Princeton scares parents who know they can pay about $1,500 in fees at a UC, not counting room and board.

Private schools--in and out of state--also woo students with promises of cozier campuses and attention from professors that may not be available at enormous UC and Cal State campuses. The financial difficulties of public education in California since the passage 10 years ago of Proposition 13 boosted recruitment chances here for Eastern schools, said Bruce Poch, Pomona’s admissions dean who used to work at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. “They like to tell horror stories about 500 students in a UC freshman lecture hall,” he said.

But the Eastern schools face psychological barriers that grants or small classes cannot erase. Many students at Los Angeles area high schools say they fear the cold weather and what they perceive to be the chilly social climate of the East.

When an admissions officer for Princeton recently asked students at Glendale High School what popped into mind when they thought of the university, one young woman quickly responded: “Snobs.”

“I think Western kids find it a lot harder to adjust to the Eastern life style than vice versa. There is more competition and hurly-burly there and our kids aren’t use to it,” said Anthony Garcia, president of the Western Assn. of College Admission Counselors and dean of academic support at Chapman College in Orange.

Eastern schools also face difficulties in attracting the new wave of immigrants to California from Asia and Latin America. Those traditionally close-knit families often want their children to stay in the state, students and counselors say.

Nervous Parents

“My parents are very nervous about sending me out there,” explained Soo Hong, a Korean-born senior at Glendale High, who is applying to several Ivy League schools as well as UC Berkeley and UCLA. “They just feel I may get homesick but they realize they can’t shelter me from the world forever.”

Amparo Gonzalez, the Princeton junior who graduated from Roosevelt High in Los Angeles, recalled that going East for college “was a very big deal in my family because I am a woman and come from a very traditional family and because I am very attached to my brother and sister and my parents.” It was difficult adjusting to new foods, new customs and new types of people, she said.

“I don’t think there’s been discrimination,” Gonzalez said. “I think what I found is that a lot of people had stereotypes and I didn’t fit that. It took them a while to realize I was someone they could learn from.” Being a Latino in an overwhelmingly Anglo environment for the first time in her life gave her more appreciation for her own background, she added. About 82% of Princeton undergraduates are Anglo, while 10% are Asian, 5% black and 3% Latino.

Don Mroscak, the college counselor at Garfield High in Los Angeles, gets parents of students who are already at Eastern schools to talk to parents of students thinking about such colleges; the message is that the youngsters will not get in trouble or turn against the family.

This fall, representatives of 82 colleges from around the country visited Garfield High, about 15 more than last year, Mroscak reported. Much of that increase was probably due to the publicity Garfield received in the movie “Stand and Deliver,” which portrays the success of calculus teacher Jaime Escalante and his mainly Latino students.

Looking for Leaders

“Some criticize me for sending my kids out of state,” explained Mroscak. “But we will need very good leaders and the youngsters who go east do have a little different perspective than the ones who stay here. They are less parochial.”

Eastern schools stress the value of that different experience to potential applicants from the West. “The types of students we are attracting are real individuals, ready for a change. So I don’t press the others who don’t seem willing to leave the state. Thats not my job,” said Katelyn Gleason, the West Coast representative of Boston University.

The sheer numbers of students in the nation’s most populous state ensures that even a small percentage increase in students enrolling in the East will be “a staggering amount,” Gleason added. That’s why some out-of-state colleges put so much effort into California.

For example, John Templeton, a Princeton admission officer, visited 37 California high schools in two weeks recently. Sometimes anxious students peppered him with questions about stiff entrance standards, dormitory life and politics on campus. At other schools, students were quiet, seemingly in awe of the Ivy League; with those, he tried to spur discussion by reading examples of essays from past applications.

His goal, he said, was “to demystify what Princeton is.” So, his manner was low-key and he rarely made comparisons to other universities. “It is far better to show you care about the decision they are trying to make, instead of trying to dazzle them,” Templeton later explained. “I don’t care for the hard sale myself, so I don’t do it.”

Fighting a Cost Gap

Meanwhile, independent colleges in California are pushing more heavily for students from the rest of the country. That is due in part to fears about a growing cost gap between themselves and public schools, as well as the increased competition from out-of-state institutions.

Between 1976 and 1986, the number of California residents attending its 65 member colleges in the state declined 10%, according to the Assn. of Independent California Colleges and Universities. But overall enrollment at the schools increased slightly because of more out-of-staters.

Many prestigious East Coast colleges say their biggest competitor for California students is Stanford, which presents itself as a sunnier, friendlier and more convenient alternative to the Ivy League. But Stanford reports that half of its undergraduates 10 years ago were California residents, while only about a third are now.

Marie Mookini, an assistant dean of undergraduate admissions at Stanford, spent much of the fall visiting high schools in California, Hawaii, Ohio and Michigan. One of the satisfactions of the job, she said, is talking to students at tough high schools in Detroit and “getting them to think beyond the city and the University of Michigan.”