COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- The tour guide seems bent on selling Texas A&M University to her audience -- 26 black and Hispanic students brought here from big-city high schools as part of the college's "Very Important Prospects" campus-visit program. Describing Texas A&M as rich in tradition, she points to a stately old live-oak tree under which generations of students have proposed marriage, and the statue where students have long left pennies for good luck on tests.

As the group sits down for lunch in a campus cafeteria, Thalia I. Padillo and Brenda C. Menchaca, both seniors at Houston's Nimitz High School, admit to having been distracted. They had been glancing around at the college's students, and what they have seen has reinforced one of their chief reservations about the place.

"We have been counting Hispanics," Ms. Padillo says, "and we have only gotten to 12 so far."

The two girls are hardly the only ones counting the number of minority students here. Texas A&M is under intense scrutiny from state lawmakers and civil-rights groups over its minority enrollment, and nearly every segment of the university has been enlisted in an all-out effort to get more black and Hispanic students to come here.

Most selective colleges feel pressure to become more racially and ethnically diverse, but Texas A&M adopted a policy last year that set it apart, and made increasing minority enrollments seem like a do-or-die mission for its leaders.

At the time, other colleges around the nation were affirming or reinstating race-conscious admissions policies in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2003 decisions in two affirmative-action cases involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Texas A&M was free to go that route if it wished. The Supreme Court's ruling had upheld the consideration of race in admissions, and essentially nullified a 1996 federal appeals court decision barring its use in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. But Texas A&M's president, Robert M. Gates, broke away from the herd and announced that his institution would find other means to enroll more minority students.

Mr. Gates came under intense criticism for his decision, but by last fall his university had set itself apart in another respect: While many other colleges, including some staunch advocates of race-conscious admissions, were suffering declines in their minority enrollment, Texas A&M's numbers were way up. In one year, the number of black freshmen had jumped by 35 percent, from 158 to 213 in a class of 7,068, while the number of Hispanic freshmen had climbed by nearly 26 percent, from 692 to 865.

Mr. Gates still has detractors. They include State Rep. Garnet F. Coleman, a Democrat and the chairman of Texas' Legislative Black Caucus, who argues it was easy for Texas A&M to produce big percentage increases in its minority enrollments because there were so few minority students here to begin with. Its total undergraduate enrollment is about 2.3 percent black and 10.1 percent Hispanic. Blacks account for about 11.6 of the state's population and 11.2 percent of its college students, while Hispanics account for about 33.6 percent of the population and 23.7 percent of students.

"The raw numbers are still very poor for a state like Texas," Mr. Coleman says. "These are people who just got a first down on the kickoff, and are celebrating like they just won the Super Bowl."

Others critics, however, have been won over. State Sen. Royce B. West, chairman of the Texas Senate's higher-education subcommittee, had vehemently objected to Mr. Gates's decision to reject race-conscious admissions -- especially without consulting him -- and had let Mr. Gates know his displeasure. He now says that he is impressed with the university president's success in reversing several years of minority enrollment declines.

"He said give me a year and, basically, if I don't turn it around you can have my head on a platter," Mr. West says. "Well, thus far, he has turned it around."

Strong Statements

Texas A&M's problems with minority recruitment are rooted in its image and history. Until 1963, it was a military-training college that admitted Hispanic students but was off-limits to black and female students. Although it has changed and grown since then, the culture here remains conservative. Not only are most of the university's students white, but nearly all are clean-cut. "You won't see many people walking around campus in blue hair," says Sally A. Diallo, a 2003 graduate.

Texas A&M has not considered race in admissions since the 1996 appeals-court ruling, which had caused minority enrollments here and at the state's other flagship, the University of Texas at Austin, to plummet.

Seeking new ways to promote campus diversity, the state Legislature had passed a law in 1997 that guaranteed students in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes admission to any public college, including the two flagship institutions. Texas A&M was much less successful than Austin, which had more minority students to begin with, in using the new law to reverse its enrollment declines.

While Austin brought its numbers close to pre-1996 levels, the number of Hispanic freshmen here dropped from 713 in the fall of 1996 to a low of 570 in 1999, while black freshman enrollment dropped from 230 in 1996 to a low of 158 in 2003.

Within hours of the Supreme Court's Michigan rulings, Austin's president, Larry T. Faulkner, announced that his institution would "fairly quickly" move to reinstate race-conscious admissions.

James A. Anderson, Texas A&M's vice president and associate provost for institutional assessment and diversity, recalls that many people thought that his university also needed "to make a strong symbolic statement regarding the inclusion of race."

Mr. Gates did make a strong statement in December 2003, but hardly the one people had expected. Speaking to students and faculty members, he declared that "students at Texas A&M should be admitted as individuals, on personal merit -- and no other basis." He said that the college would undertake "new and significant efforts" to enroll more minority students, but its admissions decisions would be based solely on applicants' personal achievements, merit, and leadership potential.

Several minority lawmakers expressed outrage. State Sen. Rodney Ellis and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, both black Democrats from Houston, threatened to call for a federal civil-rights investigation if the campus failed to become more racially diverse. Senator West said that lawmakers might seek to withhold funds from the university or block appointments to the system's Board of Regents if minority enrollments did not rise.

The controversy prompted some faculty members, students, and lawmakers to argue that Mr. Gates's championship of meritocracy was belied by Texas A&M's policy of giving an edge to applicants related to alumni, commonly known as "legacies." Mr. Gates said that the legacy policy mattered in the admission of only about 300 students a year, but he nonetheless decided to do away with it, agreeing with his critics that the consideration of legacy and not race would be "fundamentally inconsistent and unfair."

'A Dramatic Departure'

A former director of the Central Intelligence Agency who held high-level posts under several U.S. presidents, Mr. Gates has mastered the Washington-insider skill of appearing dead serious and approachable at the same time. Sitting in his office overlooking the campus, he refuses to get pulled into the broader debate over affirmative action in college admissions, and says only that he is convinced that his strategy is the right one for Texas A&M.

Mr. Gates, who assumed the university's presidency in August 2002, explains that Texas A&M, a land-grant institution, has a populist ethos and a long history of serving students "without pedigree," who believe in being judged solely on their achievements. About a quarter of its enrollment is made up of first-generation college students, as has been the case for several years. About half of its students gain admission through the state's 10-percent law, while another quarter have gotten in courtesy of the university's policy of automatically granting admission to applicants who have SAT scores of at least 1300 and rank in the top half of their high-school classes.

One of his goals in retaining race-blind admissions was ensuring "that every student here knew that every other student was here on the same basis," Mr. Gates says. (The medical school on this campus has gone back to considering applicants' race, but that decision was made by administrators at the medical school, which is independent of the university, with the approval of the university system's governing board.)

Mr. Gates says that his university's problem was not so much that too few minority students were applying or gaining admission, but that too few were choosing to enroll. Whereas about 63 percent of the white students admitted to Texas A&M ended up as students here, just 44 percent of the black and Hispanic students admitted showed up at the door. In 2002, 664 black students applied and 386 were admitted as freshmen, but just 182 enrolled.

"It was clear to me that we needed to do something that represented a dramatic departure from what we had been doing in the past," Mr. Gates says.

'Not Rocket Science'

He describes the overall strategy that he devised as "an hourglass approach." At the top half of the admissions process, recruitment, he devoted an additional $3-million toward new outreach efforts intended to convince minority students that Texas A&M was right for them. At the bottom part, financial aid, he committed $8.3-million toward new scholarships heavily geared toward minority students, and took pains to make sure that those students would get a larger share of the $329-million in financial aid and loans that the university already offered. He also established a 25-member team of representatives from programs and departments throughout the university and instructed it to meet weekly to carry out his diversity plans.

Mr. Gates has made a point of personally visiting several urban high schools around the state. He says that his presence "clearly elicits more participation by school officials and others" in Texas A&M's outreach efforts, and conveys the high priority that the university is placing on diversity, creating a more receptive environment for its recruiters.

It is only the middle part of the process, deciding which applicants to admit, that remained race-neutral.

Because Mr. Gates announced his plans midway through the academic year and the admissions cycle, the university was able to focus only on the bottom half of the hourglass and try to enroll as many minority students as possible out of the pool already admitted as freshmen for the fall of 2004. Officials here are convinced that black and Hispanic enrollments will jump again next fall, when the effects of their new recruitment efforts are felt. (The university has not undertaken any efforts specifically geared toward enrolling more American Indian or Asian-American students.)

"This is not rocket science," says Mr. Anderson, the Texas A&M vice president. "We are doing very fundamental things, but we are committed to them."

Race-Conscious Resistance

It's a sunny afternoon, and the administrators at Houston's Booker T. Washington High School have decided to give the students a treat: a small carnival in the school's courtyard. Two disc jockeys pump up the crowd by playing rap music so loud it rattles the building's windows.

Despite all the fun outside, about 20 students, nearly all of them black or Hispanic, have gathered in a classroom to hear a presentation by Texas A&M recruiters. Shannon Johnson, a black Texas A&M graduate and representative of the university's honors program, asks them if they have any concerns. They express the same reservations that she often hears on such visits, and she has ready responses to each.

When a girl says she is worried about Texas A&M's lack of minority students, Ms. Johnson asserts that Texas A&M has just as many as other colleges -- they just seem badly outnumbered because the university's overall enrollment is so large.

Several students worry about feeling bored and isolated in College Station, a cow town turned college town. Ms. Johnson responds that the town is actually at the center of the action, because Austin, Dallas, and Houston are all within a few hours' drive.

When a boy says he thinks he would be happier at a historically black college such as Prairie View A&M University, Ms. Johnson counters that "the world looks like Texas A&M. It doesn't look like Prairie View."

"It is not a bad thing to go somewhere where you might be a minority," she says. "You learn about different people."

The university's efforts to appeal to minority members appear to have made an impression on the 26 students who take a Very Important Prospects tour of the campus the following morning. Even Ms. Menchaca, one of the two girls who has been counting Hispanic students, concedes: "They're really welcoming. They really want to take us in."

Some students are harder to persuade.

Ariel P. Aaron, a 17-year-old from Dallas's Kimball High School, which is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, says he is worried about encountering racism here, and would prefer a more-diverse environment that was not "in the middle of nowhere."

But one of Mr. Aaron's classmates at Kimball, DeJuan A. Wooten, says Texas A&M "is my No. 1 choice," and its lack of diversity does not concern him. "No matter where I go, I just seem to get along with everybody," he says.

Lingering Suspicion

Of the dozens of current students interviewed for this article, the overwhelming majority supported Mr. Gates's decisions dealing with race- and legacy-conscious admissions.

"I prefer for them not to consider race," say Jeffrey Delgado, a Hispanic sophomore. "I don't want people to think, 'Oh, because of his race, he is here.'"

Like many other large universities, Texas A&M has had its share of racial incidents, and continues to have some racial tensions. Some students here say that the university's all-out efforts to increase its minority enrollments have stirred some resentment among white students and fostered suspicions that black and Hispanic applicants continue to gain an admissions edge.

Even some black and Hispanic students seem convinced that they were admitted because of their race or ethnicity. When reassured that that is not the case, Deena Estrada, a Hispanic junior, flashes a big smile and high-fives two friends.

"Wow," she exclaims, "I got in myself!"

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CASTING FARTHER, REELING HARDER

Texas A&M University at College Station has undertaken a multi-pronged effort to enroll more minority students without considering race in admissions decisions. Its key elements:

Dispersed Recruiters
Until this academic year, Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin had jointly operated several "outreach centers" around the state, their goal being to get more minority students interested in college. Texas A&M's president, Robert M. Gates, has abandoned that effort and instead established six "prospective-student centers" geared toward gloves-off competition for students. His university has moved most of its recruiters from the College Station campus to these outposts, located in Corpus Christi, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and the Brazos and Rio Grande Valleys.

Financial-Aid Outreach
Texas A&M has spent about $2-million to staff each of its prospective-student centers with a financial-aid officer who can visit local families and schools and talk people through the process of applying for aid. "Instead of the community coming to us, we are going to the community," says Arnold Trejo, the university's executive director of student financial aid. "If you want us in your home, at your kitchen table, advising you about college costs and affordability, we will do that."

Minority Alumni as Ambassadors
The university has mobilized the members of its black and Hispanic alumni associations to visit homes, schedule or hold local recruitment events, and otherwise assist its outreach efforts. Much of the attention of its staff recruiters and alumni volunteers is focused on high schools in low-income areas with large minority populations. The university has also sought to build relationships with churches that have congregations consisting mainly of minority members from a wide range of economic backgrounds.

Prospective Students as 'VIP's'
Texas A&M has established a new Very Important Prospects, or VIP, campus-visit program for students from high schools with large minority populations. Instead of asking students in a distant city to show up at some central location to catch a bus to the campus, it sends a van or sport-utility vehicle to their high school's door. Once on the campus, students are welcomed by top university officials, walked through how to apply for financial aid and scholarships, and dispersed to private meetings with students and faculty members from the academic departments that attract their interest.

Recruitment for the Corps
A linchpin of Texas A&M's new minority-recruitment strategy is its military-training program, the Corps of Cadets. Realizing that black and Hispanic students each account for about a third of those enlisted in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in high schools, the university has greatly expanded a program that brings JROTC participants to its campus for four days of leadership training. This year it plans to bring about 370 JROTC participants to the campus--nearly three times as many as two years ago--and to eventually enroll 150 to 200, about half of them black or Hispanic. "If we are just fishing in this prospect pool, diversity is taking care of itself," says Sgt. Major Dennis L. Hastings, the Corps of Cadets' assistant director in charge of recruiting.

First-Generation Scholarships
President Gates has set aside $3-million for a new scholarship program that provides awards of up to $5,000 a year to first-generation college students from families with annual incomes below the state's median of $40,000. More than half of the 620 incoming freshmen who received such scholarships last fall were black or Hispanic.

Enlistment of School Officials
At selected high schools with large minority enrollments, Texas A&M has been telling administrators that it has set aside 10 scholarships, worth $3,000 each, for their school's students. Mr. Trejo, the student-aid director, says officials at the schools have "loved it" and "in essence became involved in our targeted recruitment efforts." President Gates also has been personally visiting urban high schools to convey the priority he has placed on minority recruitment and to drum up interest in Texas A&M among the schools' administrators.

Bidding for Students
Mr. Gates set aside about $500,000 to enable the university's financial-aid office to make counteroffers to students who have been offered scholarships from another institution.

A View Beyond the Freshman Year
The university has pumped $1-million into programs intended to help it retain and graduate those minority students already on campus. At the graduate level, President Gates dedicated $1.25-million to a new fellowship program intended to bring more minority students to the campus and to build relationships between Texas A&M and the faculty members of colleges with large minority populations.

Copyright © 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education