By Rhonda Hillbery

Caltech launches new initiatives to enhance diversity among the Institute’s graduate student population.

Twice as many black, Latino, and other underrepresented minority students are entering graduate school at Caltech this fall compared to last year, thanks in part to better outreach efforts and new use of an online application service.
That’s the good news, tempered by the small numbers involved. We’re talking about 20 new students, compared to last year’s total of just 10. But this year does mark a new Caltech high, boosting underrepresented students in the graduate school population to 64, up from 46 in 2000. It also signals that a range of initiatives designed to
improve grad student diversity on campus may be starting to pay off.

Increasing diversity is a key mission for Rod Kiewiet, dean of graduate studies, who confirmed the numbers in his Parsons-Gates office. “We did work real hard,” he said, adding that administrative diligence tells only part of the story.
Working hard means sending representatives to national academic conferences and handing out interest cards
for prospective students to fill out. It means contacting students who declined to come as undergraduates, when the time comes for them to choose a graduate school; encouraging students who have started the application process to complete it; and deploying emissaries on special outreach trips to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other institutions.

Kiewiet also gives much of the credit to the strength of the 22 graduate options and their faculty, and to the success of their “visiting weekends” for prospective students.

He also singles out better fellowship and assistantship offers, which Caltech strives to make competitive with the benchmark $18,000 offered by the National Science Foundation. “We really want to make sure that if it makes sense for a grad student to come here to Caltech that money is not an issue; so that they don’t turn us down because our offer was not competitive.”

Despite signs of progress, Caltech isn’t claiming bragging rights in an elusive and complex effort to bring more African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Pacific Islanders to campus. The still-low numbers reflect the challenges facing higher education in general, especially in the math, science, and engineering schools. The Institute picture is similar at the undergraduate level, with 28 underrepresented minorities enrolling this fall, a good jump over last year’s 18, but still not a large number.
Some of the factors leading to Caltech’s modest improvement remain unknown. “Even though we engaged in a lot of outreach efforts, a large majority of underrepresented minority applications came in from people we had never contacted,” Kiewiet acknowledges. “They just sent in applications.”

KEEN COMPETITION

“We knew nothing would happen without more applications,” Kiewiet says. “That’s been the largest bottleneck so far.”
This year more than half of the Institute’s grad school applications came in through Embark, an online application service used by Caltech for the first time. Overall, the firm reports receiving sharply higher numbers of online applications processed for hundreds of colleges and universities. According to one of its surveys, some 92 percent of prospective graduate students reported using the Internet to research or apply to graduate programs.

“It may have opened up a new pool of applicants,” Kiewiet says, adding that the online process also saves money and avoids the hassle of mailing bulky application packages.

The rise in online applications is encouraging, especially since overall Caltech graduate school applications dropped to 3,728 this year from 3,886 in 2000.

Once applicants are evaluated, Caltech finds itself competing for the same pool of underrepresented minority students sought by the nation’s other top schools. All possess the exemplary test scores, grades, and glowing letters of recommendation required for admission, so they can often pick and choose among colleges. “Competition for
domestic students is quite severe. The ball game you’re in is a very tough one,” Kiewiet believes.

This year the school received 105 applications from underrepresented minority students compared to 84 in 2000. Many of them undoubtedly received multiple offers, Kiewiet says. “I’m sure a lot of them got accepted everywhere theyapplied, with rare exceptions. I just have a strong sense that the number of minority students that do have Caltech credentials is definitely going up.”

More than half of the 31 underrep-resented students who were offered admission accepted. Among the 20, 14 identify themselves as Hispanic, four as African American, and two as Native American.

Why weren’t higher numbers of minority students offered admission? Kiewiet says the graduate program is in line with overall Institute numbers. In Caltech’s tough academic waters, only one of seven or so applicants makes the cut. And its small size sometimes makes a match difficult between students and graduate options. “Each student needs to be picked up by a research group,” Kiewiet says, adding that the Institute’s limited range of options in certain fields may encourage some students to look elsewhere.

The familiar refrain that too few minorities enter engineering and science college programs is underscored by the world of work. National statistics show that underrepresented minorities account for 23 percent of the total U.S. population but add up to only six percent of the engineering and technology workforce.

No one seems to expect rapid gains. The hope is that diversity will come to mirror the steady incremental rise in female students since Caltech went coed in 1970.

MIRRORING THE OUTSIDE WORLD

In plain terms, Caltech needs to look a lot more like the outside world, says President David Baltimore.
“This is a great challenge because it involves surmounting historical barriers and requires moving forward in sometimes difficult and often innovative ways,” the president said in a recent statement.

“I have emphasized diversity as a goal both because its realization will increase the pool of talent from which Caltech can draw and because it will make the atmosphere on the campus a more realistic model of the world outside. Moreover, I personally feel that achieving diversity is the moral responsibility of a university in contemporary America.”
Backing up the good intentions with action are administrators and faculty alike. Among them is Miriam Feldblum, special assistant to the president, who has visited HBCUs including Atlanta’s Morehouse College, and hosted its representatives on campus last spring.

Caltech also is building ties with other colleges and universities. As a founding university partner of EMERGE, Empowering Minority Engineers to Reach for Graduate Education, the Institute is helping forge a national partnership committed to increasing minority graduate rates in science, engineering, and mathematics.

EMERGE plans to forge cooperation among universities and to work toward building “a true national pipeline for producing minority graduates,” especially at the advanced-degree level.

Through these and other alliances, such as Quality Education for Minorities (QEM), Caltech hopes to improve its institutional outreach by collaborating with other institutions to achieve representation in the math, science, and engineering fields on a par with the general population.

“This is the first time we have endeavored to achieve our goals more at an Institute-wide level,” Feldblum says. “One of the things we learned is that there have been good efforts at recruiting minorities, but the whole follow-through hasn’t been there.”

Perceptions can be tough to change, among them that Caltech is insular, Kiewiet says. “Here in the middle of L.A., an amalgam of different groups, we have a little institution that seems impervious to the rest of the goings-on in the world.”

This is the case despite the fact that Caltech is very diverse in a global sense. As evidenced by the multitude of languages spoken around campus, there’s no doubt that Caltech has achieved an international diversity impressive for its size--—900 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students. Out of 252 graduate students starting Caltech this fall, about half are international, while U.S. citizens total 131.

Efforts also have been marked by a new consistency and cohesion since Baltimore became president in 1998. “In the past there were some really strong individual efforts,” says Sue Borrego, director and associate dean of the office for minority student affairs (MSA). “But they were piecemeal.”

Echoing Feldblum’s sentiments, she says, “Now there is really an effort to throw a net around what we’re doing. We really are working as an institution to collaborate more and to build more crossover between graduate and undergraduate affairs.”

That melding is critical at an institution like Caltech, where the small student population and often-solitary nature of hitting the books and conducting laboratory research can breed isolation.

The office of minority student affairs can play an important role by providing day-to-day support to students, and helping them build educational and leadership skills. It also weaves support for and awareness of diversity throughout the Institute.

Underrepresented graduate and undergraduate students get together at informal MSA monthly luncheons, where conversations can range from PlayStation II Street Fighter to the difficulty of a quantum mechanics course.
One afternoon last spring, as 25 or so students broke up after devouring a spread of spare ribs, coleslaw, and baked beans, MSA assistant director Brandi Jones reminded them to attend an upcoming career-night program. “I want to expose you to the world!” proclaimed Jones over the protests of a few students who claimed they were too busy to attend.

She describes how MSA reaches students by offering them social, academic, and other support services and by supporting campus groups like the Caltech National Society of Black Engineers, Club Latino and CLASES (the Caltech Latino Association of Students in Engineering and Science). “We’re trying to reach out and let grad students know we’re here. The key is fostering communication.”

In comfortable surroundings in the Student Services Center, MSA shares common space with other groups such as International Student Programs, which is headquartered right across the hall.

A collection of other efforts is intended to enhance programs that have become indispensable.

A newly formed president’s office Diversity Initiative Fund will seek proposals for program or single-event funding, in part supported by the Irvine Foundation Grant.

The current three-year $2.2 million Irvine commitment helps fund 11 budgeted areas, including nine two-year graduate fellowships totaling $725,000. Another $45,000 goes to outreach programs, with $75,000 earmarked for multicultural activities on campus, including lectures and cultural celebrations. The grant doubles the $1.1 million awarded during a previous three-year period.

Caltech’s Minority Undergraduate Research Fellowships (MURFs), which bring talented undergraduates to campus to work for a summer in a research laboratory, also can help students determine choices for graduate school, planting the seed for a future return to campus. Like participants in the SURF program on which it’s modeled, students work under the guidance of faculty members.

As the Institute moves forward, the graduate school office intends to assess each year to see which recruitment methods have succeeded and which have not. “I’m not going to choose to believe our goal is insurmountable,” Kiewiet says. “That leads to defeatism.”

In the end, he suggests, the institution’s reputation as a hotbed of science and engineering knowledge must be the most compelling draw of all. “This is a science and engineering school first and foremost, and the defining culture of Caltech is science and engineering in a foremost and fundamental way. What a great thing to pursue.”

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