OPENING THE DOOR : Diversification Has Its Problems : Despite steps to increase minority enrollment, some students see an insensitivity.

California Lutheran University officials aim to double the number of new minority students there in the next two years, and to boost minority enrollment to 50% by the end of this decade. But behind each number stand many separate tales.

The stories of three Cal Lutheran students--Elsa Torres, Claudia Sumaran and Ruth Nguyen--hint at the possibilities, and problems, of diversification.

Red-Tape Refugee

Elsa Torres, a 19-year-old freshman from Moorpark, is the first in her family to attend college, and one of six children. But she has been a regular on the Cal Lutheran campus since her sophomore year in high school, when she entered the federally funded Upward Bound college preparation program. Through Upward Bound, Torres and about 50 other low-income high school students spent six weeks of their summer vacations living and studying at the college campus.

Torres, who had a 4.0 grade-point average at Moorpark High School, was accepted by UC San Diego and planned to start there last fall. “I knew everything here, so what was there to explore?” she says.

But with just a month left before classes began, she says, she had received little information and no financial aid from the San Diego school. “Basically, they let me down,” she says. (UC San Diego officials said freshmen are notified of admission by March 15 and are told of financial aid well before May 1. “The only thing I can think of is that she might not have responded to something,” said Ronald Bowker, UC San Diego registrar and director of admissions.)

Torres looked for an alternative. Through Rosa Moreno, formerly an Upward Bound counselor and now Cal Lutheran’s educational equity officer, she was wooed back by Cal Lutheran.

She decided to abandon UC San Diego on Sept. 4--the first day of classes at Cal Lutheran--and is living on campus and receiving a full-ride scholarship. Torres, whose grade-point average was higher than a B her first semester, plans to major in psychology.

Hesitant Applicant

Claudia Sumaran, 19, did well at Channel Islands High School in Oxnard, took the SAT, then faltered when it came to time to choose a university. “I was scared,” she says.

Moreno got to Sumaran in April, 1989--just three months before her high school graduation and months after most colleges had stopped taking applications. With Moreno’s help, Sumaran got into Cal Lutheran, received financial aid and is now a sophomore living on campus. She’s majoring in psychology. But that’s not where her story ends.

“I’m not too happy,” Sumaran says. “Last semester, I had a really hard time.”

One factor in that, she says, may be her sense that people on campus and in the Thousand Oaks community seem frequently insensitive to minority issues. The shortage of nonwhite faces in classrooms, she says, doesn’t help.

Says Sumaran: “You’re less likely to raise your hand and say, ‘Can you repeat that? I don’t understand.’ Because you don’t want someone to think, ‘The Mexican doesn’t understand.’ ”

Self-Recruiter

Ruth Nguyen was born in Da Nang, Vietnam, immigrated to the United States at 5 and graduated 13 years later from the private Newbury Park Adventist Academy. Her grades were good and her first choice, for reasons she can’t fully explain, was Cal Lutheran.

“I recruited myself,” she says. “I didn’t even have a tour. I just went and signed up. I had a gut feeling that I wanted to come here.”

Now 21, she is a junior majoring in biology and struggling, at the moment, with organic chemistry. She has seen “lots of Norwegian people” (in keeping with its Norwegian-Lutheran origins, the campus has an exchange program) but no other Vietnamese students. That’s not a problem, she says, because “I don’t think about the race thing. I think about personalities.”