HIGHER EDUCATION BRIEFING

MINORITY ENROLLMENT: Four-year public colleges and universities are losing the battle to recruit and keep minority students, according to the American Assn. of State Colleges and Universities. Since 1982, black enrollment has remained a steady 8.1%. Latino enrollment rose to 3.9% in 1988 from 3.2% in 1982; Asian enrollment was 3.8% in 1988, up from 3.2% in 1982.

“Despite the fact that institutions have said they expended money for recruiting minorities, they have not built programs to retain them,” said George Ayers, vice president for academic affairs at the association.

At Antioch College, a small liberal arts school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, years of effort have not raised minority enrollments above 13%, according to Karen Deibel, assistant director of admissions. Antioch has placed ads in minority-oriented publications, participated in college fairs and visited high schools with diverse student bodies. “We are always changing strategies and trying this and trying that,” she said, “but our enrollment hasn’t increased.”

Even some state colleges in urban areas claim recruitment can be hard. This year, Rhode Island College, where minority enrollment is about 4% of 10,000 students, will hire a special admissions officer to address the problem.

“We, like other schools, don’t have a great record, although we make tremendous efforts in this area,” said spokesman Robert Bower.

. . . THAT FAILURE is critical to the future of many colleges, because the “reality is that the minority population is the pool they will have to draw from soon,” said Bernard L. Charles, a senior vice president of Quality Education for Minorities Network, a national organization for minority education in public schools.

And Stan Carpenter of the Assn. for the Study of Higher Education at Texas A & M University noted that the pool of 18- to 24-year-old males--who make up the bulk of college enrollment--increasingly is dominated by minorities.

“When you look at who is going to be coming through colleges, it’s minority students and new immigrants,” said Charles. He cited statistics that minorities and women will make up 85% of those entering the work force in the year 2000.

. . . RACIAL FRICTION is exacerbating the problem, according to a recent Carnegie Foundation report.

“Students are separating themselves more sharply along racial and ethnic lines,” the report said, and it noted a “breakdown in civility” on some campuses. Since 1986, racist graffiti, jokes, fights and anonymous hate letters have been reported at hundreds of colleges and universities.

One college president told researchers that “the 1990s will be a time of confrontation” among black, white and Asian students.

FACULTY SHORTAGE: In the next decade, more than half of the nation’s college faculty members are expected to retire.

University professors today are older than they have ever been--more than half of them are over 50, according to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. That means that by 1995, the faculty exodus will be in full swing, said Betty Vetter, executive director of the nonprofit commission.

“We have not been hiring very many new faculty since 1982 because the number of students has been dropping,” she said.