California College Guide : Holding On to Minority Students : Diversity: Programs to ease the way into the college environment help curb a high dropout rate.

Rosario Gutierrez was a college recruiter’s dream.

A decathlon competitor, the Latina teen-ager from Los Angeles’ Pico-Union district got nearly straight A’s at Garfield High School, where she took a heavy load of college-credit courses. By the time she hit her senior year, she had netted nearly $6,000 in college scholarships from local Latino groups and had her pick of UCLA, Harvard University, Scripps College in Pomona and Los Angeles’ Occidental College.

But minority students such as Gutierrez, who seem a sure bet for success in college and beyond, have a disturbingly high dropout rate, according to education experts. That is why Occidental College counselors steered her into their Multicultural Summer Institute in the summer of 1990.

“I’m convinced that MSI does make a difference,” said Gutierrez, now a junior with a B-plus average and a Ford Foundation fellowship for a project to help plan a cross-cultural course on the American Dream. “It gave me a sense of achievement, like I really can be in college.”

Educators for more than a decade have been deeply concerned about the low numbers of minority students graduating from the nation’s four-year colleges and universities. Efforts to recruit minority students have blossomed into programs across California and elsewhere that target talented youngsters from the earliest grades to go on to college.

But educators began noticing in the early 1980s that many of these students they had worked so hard to place were having problems academically and socially, and some were dropping out.

A recent University of California study found that nearly half of black students and about a third of Latino students leave college before graduation. Among American Indian UC students, whose numbers are very small to begin with, only 49% get their bachelor’s degree within six years of entering college. That compares to a graduation rate of more than 72% for Anglo and Asian-American students, according to the UC study completed last May.

The answer, say many educators, is to help these youngsters from very different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds adapt to the still largely Anglo world of academia.

“What appears to be academic deficiency or a lack of proper preparation on the part of black and Latino students is really a symptom . . . that students don’t feel at home in the college environment,” said Eric Newhall, an American studies professor and founding director of Occidental’s Multicultural Summer Institute.

The highly regarded MSI program has been held each summer since 1986 for about 50 entering Occidental freshmen. Its goal is to immerse minority students in college-level work, and at the same time give them counseling, study skills workshops and intensive essay-writing classes to prepare them for the challenges ahead.

Perhaps a more important goal of the program is to bridge cultural, social and academic barriers by giving these students the run of the campus over the summer, acquainting them with the library, the counseling center and numerous professors.

“It’s not a perfect program, but the basic assumptions are correct: More attention needs to be paid to the not-so-simple process of making these students feel supported, welcomed, encouraged and at home in the college environment,” said Newhall, who runs the program at a cost of about $2,500 per student with foundation grants. “The level of social alienation is a bigger problem than anyone is willing to admit.”

Gutierrez agrees.

“That summer was the first time I had ever been away from home and I was really scared,” said the 20-year-old woman, whose father at first insisted she commute to college from the family’s one-bedroom apartment. “But I met 49 people like myself, and a lot of them had parental problems just like me.”

The course was good immersion therapy in the realities of college life, but in smaller doses with classes of one instructor for every dozen or so students.

“Before everybody got here and the school was filled with 1,500 students in the fall, I got to take a course in history and see what college work was like. I didn’t know what a blue book was,” she said, laughing about her first encounter with the blank essay pamphlets. “I didn’t know what it was like to write a 10-page essay in a short period of time. I had to learn about time management, all those things.”

But for Gutierrez, the “magic” of the summer institute was the personal relationships she was able to form with fellow students and faculty, people she is still closest to after two years at Occidental.

“At Garfield High, everybody was Latino. I know two other people who came from Garfield and we all experienced major culture shock when school started. We were thrown into this situation of being in the minority instead of the majority,” she said. “Having gone through MSI made us so much more comfortable, because we already knew how to use the library, the counseling center. We just felt we were so much more prepared . . . than other students.”

Many private colleges and most of the eight UC undergraduate campuses and the 20 California State University campuses have some type of “bridge” program to help minority students make the transition to college. UC Irvine and other campuses also have strong mentor programs to link minority youths with older students and faculty members who can serve as sounding boards and advisers during the inevitable rough periods in a college career.

It is the environment that is the key to success, said Eugene Garcia, a professor of education and psychology at UC Santa Cruz.

“The greatest set of data suggests the friendlier the campus climate, the more likely those students are to survive,” said Garcia, who is heading a UC task force to determine why only 3.9% of California’s Latino high school graduates in 1991 were eligible to attend a UC campus.

“If you are the only black, the only Latino, you’ve got a climate problem. At (UC) Berkeley and UCLA, one of the reasons we believe they are more successful with minority students is that they have greater numbers of them. . . .

“The other factor is institutional climate: To what extent are you going to find people who can help you get through chemistry, get through math or find a counselor to steer you in the right direction?” said Garcia, the only one of 10 children in a family of migrant farm workers in Colorado to have graduated from college.

For an elite liberal arts college the size of Occidental, with about 1,600 students, it is relatively easy to involve the students in campus life. But Newhall has found that MSI graduates are even more likely than the average Occidental student to be involved in student government and other activities.

MSI graduates also are more likely to graduate than the average Occidental student. This past school year, 86% of the students who were in MSI before their freshman year graduated. Campuswide, the graduation rate is about 80%.

“Clearly, we think this program is working extremely well,” Newhall said. “If you give me $2,500 per student, and with the proper follow-up and support services, I will give you a graduation rate of 85%.”

Last fall, about 41% of the entering freshman class were from underrepresented ethnic groups. Gutierrez wishes there were more programs like MSI to pave the way for students of color.

“MSI is really a fantastic privilege,” she said. “If every freshman could go through it, I think a lot of the racial tensions and kids dropping out would lessen.”