Monday, January 8, 2001
Infectious laughter
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Holiday schedule for calendar year 2001 announced
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Adminstrative changes
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Road show
Admissions office undertakes several initiatives to increase minority enrollment
By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

Karen Webb, associate director of admissions, is responsible for outreach efforts and minority recruitment in undergraduate admissions. She spoke recently with Columns about current initiatives aimed at increasing the number of minority students at UGA.

Columns: You came from the Graduate School, didn’t you?
Webb: Yes. It’s very different--high school students are a tougher audience. They are subject to so many influences and so many distractions. And it takes a few years to cultivate and to develop markets--especially new markets. For us, African Americans and other minorities are not new markets, but we really need to re-focus our attention on them as in the past.

Columns: We didn’t worry much about recruiting in general.
Webb: Right--in the past we didn’t have to. We knew that we had a recognized draw in Georgia--but African-American students were less likely to apply.

Columns: What approach are you taking?
Webb: We have a number of programs. We have Georgia Preview Day. We invite African-American students, and their parents, to come and see what the campus is like on a typical day.

Columns: What age students?
Webb: We invite any student who indicates an interest in UGA--juniors, seniors, some sophomores. We provide information on admission, housing and financial aid. They have the opportunity to speak to current students, faculty and staff. They get to go to class; they get a campus tour; they get to tour the dorm. They get to see what we’re about.
Then we visit every high school that has a fair, every high school that invites us. We’ve made specific appointments at high schools all over the state and specifically in the metro Atlanta area.

Columns: African-American students have many options.
Webb: Right. We usually don’t have a problem with the number of minority applications or the number of minority students admitted. But then we have to convince them this is where they ought to be. These are the top students in the state, and they have offers from several other places. Why should they come to Georgia?
Every school in the nation also recruits in Atlanta. There’s lots of competition from other schools, whose recruiters offer scholarships on the spot.
So we put our traveling boots back on and go back into the high schools to talk to students who are admitted. We also have admitted-student receptions.

Columns: What do you do to convince them?
Webb: When we’re making visits to the Atlanta schools, UGA student volunteers go with us. There is a volunteer group called the Georgia Recruitment Team, along with volunteers from the student NAACP chapter and from Student Government. Prospective students want to hear what a current UGA student has to say.
We’ve also designed a high school outreach program. Any UGA student can go back to their high school--any student, not just minority students--to talk with prospective students there. We offer an hour and a half of training, and we provide all the materials they need.
We’re working with the counselors at the high schools. A lot of the counselors in schools with a large minority population are not UGA graduates, and there is a perception that we don’t take care of our students, that we don’t have retention programs and so on. We need to let them know about the support services we have.
We just created a recruitment advisory committee, with representation from faculty, staff and students, to help specifically with our minority recruitment efforts. And not just African-American
students--we have a growing Hispanic population in Georgia.

Columns: How about more general outreach programs?
Webb: We’re working with Dr. Art Dunning [vice president for public service and outreach] and Dr. Tom Dyer [vice president for instruction] to put together outreach efforts utilizing 4-H officers and county extension agents. These programs are not specifically tailored to minority students. For example, there are a number of 4-H camps at Rock Eagle in the summer, and we asked to be on the program.

Columns: These would be general college prep workshops?
Webb: Yes. Some of our neighboring counties are very rural. Many of those students will be the first in their family to go to college. What we want to do is to demystify the process--showing them why they should come to UGA and in general why they should go to college. We’re going to begin pre-college clubs in each of the 14 neighboring counties. This is not just for minorities--it’s for every student, but I think we will get good minority participation.

Columns: Do we do any recruitment of transfer students?
Webb: One of the best things we have done is to host a two-year-college workshop that was coordinated by Ann Crowther, the assistant vice president for instruction. It was an opportunity for two-year schools to talk to us about our requirements, to talk to our evaluators about specific courses that may transfer.

Columns: It’s hard to predict what will have the best effect in increasing minority student numbers.
Webb: We have to know what they want and provide it. If prospective students want an all-black environment, that’s not something we can realistically provide. We’re not about providing an all-white environment or an all-black environment--we provide a holistic college experience that can be tailored by each student. They’re going to have their own individual experience, and that’s what works. If that is attractive to minority students, then we want them to come here.
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