Frederick Humphries had come to deal.
Around the conference table at Kenwood Academy sat a dozen of the school`s best students, among the top teenage African-American scholars in the nation.
Humphries, president of Florida A&M University, wanted them at his college. And he wanted to make an impression.
On the spot, based on information on the small cards the students had filled out, he offered scholarships. He made it a point to call the teenagers by their first names.
”I think the blue-chip students ought to be pursued just as hard as the blue-chip athletes,” Humphries said later, explaining his aggressive and hugely successful campaign to personally recruit the country`s highest achieving black high school students.
The students at Kenwood, in Hyde Park, were impressed-by the money Humphries offered and by his mere presence. Even a teen jaded by hundreds of letters from colleges, obscure and prestigious, and numbed by a parade of recruiters with slick brochures appreciates what it means when the chief executive comes knocking.
”You feel really special when somebody like the president of a college comes and makes a direct request for you,” said Michael Luckett, 17, who ultimately chose Florida A&M over Dartmouth after free trips to both campuses. Top minority students have been in demand for a long time-for that matter, top students of all races generally are hot commodities-but, in recent years, the courting of black students has intensified to the point that Humphries` analogy to sports seems appropriate.
Stagnant or decreasing black enrollments for most of the 1980s prompted many predominantly white colleges and universities to step up their recruitment efforts, while historically black colleges, such as Florida A&M, began to pursue the same teenagers with new vigor.
Fueling the phenomenon has been a weak economy and the increasing cost of a college education, making students and their parents more attentive to the bottom line and more willing to shop around for the best deal.
When Humphries called Joyce Brown, a Kenwood guidance counselor, he asked her what would entice the school`s best students to Tallahassee, Fla.
”I said, `Offer them money,` ” she recalled. ”With financial times being what they are, parents are looking at the money.”
Students with several offers are more than willing to play schools off one another to get better financial packages, when possible. At the very least, they are examining the fine print of every school`s offer, no matter how prestigious.
”I think students are a little more sophisticated now,” said Derek Gandy, director of minority recruitment for Yale University. ”They`re not saying, `It`s Yale, it`s Harvard, it`s Princeton. I have to go.` They`re saying, `Are you giving me the resources I need to attend?` These people are receiving offers from all over the place.
”You have a very limited number of certain minority ethnic groups going on to college. The black male is in high demand because there aren`t very many men going on. So everybody`s vying for those students, and everybody`s trying to get the cream of the crop.”
The recruiting usually begins junior year with a trickle of letters in the mail that soon turns into a flood.
Dawn Holliday, 17, a senior at the University of Chicago Lab School, recalled receiving four or five letters a day.
”It`s kind of fun,” she said. ”You`re trying to figure out how many trees they actually used.”
That, though, was just the beginning. Colleges need to do something or offer something that will stand out.
The University of Southern California may have topped all competitors with its banquet for Trustee Scholars, consisting of top high school students of all races, on the campus in Los Angeles.
Sitting next to Holliday was the president of the university, Steven B. Sample. On her plate was a meal she barely noticed.
”I could`ve eaten sauerkraut or something,” she said. ”I was so excited I couldn`t really eat. I was just picking at the food.”
She also was awed by the full-tuition scholarship the university is dangling to Trustee Scholars, a merit award worth more than $16,000 a year toward her pursuit of a film degree.
”It was almost too good to be true,” said Holliday, who also is interested in the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard. ”It made me want to stay there at the campus and have Dad ship all the clothes.”
Schools that don`t offer merit awards, such as those in the Ivy League and Northwestern University, can find themselves at a disadvantage in a keenly competitive environment. They provide money based on need and try to sell their schools based on reputation.
Northwestern will not engage in a bidding war for students, said Rebecca Dixon, associate provost of university enrollment.
”We don`t do it, and we don`t like it,” she said. ”But it`s a reality.”
In raising the stakes, however, Humphries at Florida A&M has demonstrated the power of money in recruiting. In his first year as president in 1985, the school drew only a handful of the nation`s seniors who were scholars under the National Achievement Scholarship Program for Outstanding Negro Students.
This fall, according to the college, Florida A&M had 62 of the black achievement scholars in its freshman class, second in the nation to Harvard, which had 64. Enrollment at the college has expanded from 5,100 to 9,200 in his six years.
Among the lures for the brightest high school seniors is a Life-Gets-Better Scholarship that includes tuition, room and board, all fees and books, as well as a $500-a-semester stipend and a guaranteed summer job with a Fortune 500 company.
Over four years, the scholarship is worth between $40,000 and $50,000. Humphries said that once he makes an offer, he will not fatten it to compete with another school.
As a whole, historically black colleges have grown in recent years. Between 1988 and 1990, total enrollment at the 104 schools grew by 7.6 percent, according to figures from the American Council on Education. Many black students have chosen the colleges because they see them as more comfortable and nurturing places than predominantly white institutions.
Still, during the same period, African-American enrollment at colleges that aren`t traditionally black also grew by 8 percent.
Those increases may be modest, but they were higher than that for whites and they reversed a trend during the first six years of the 1980s that saw an overall decline in African-American enrollment, even at historically black schools.
The gains, however, have not been enough to bring full diversity to most colleges, making recruitment a continuing priority.
One result is a high-gloss, ”Madison Avenue” approach to gaining students` attention through brochures and school bulletins, said Richard Bryant, college and career coordinator at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora.
”Colleges and universities are getting a lot glitzier with their marketing,” he said. ”It sometimes catches people`s eye and sometimes it kind of encourages people to not look at the things that are central to an education.
With all the options comes pressure to make a decision. Colleges have differing cut-off dates for their offers, making it difficult sometimes for a student to pass up a big-money offer, even if he or she hasn`t heard all the details about what another school can provide financially and academically.
Even with the difficult decision-making, and the second-guessing that comes with any major decision, most students seem to enjoy the experience.
”I think they`re having a ball,” said Sharon Yarber, whose daughter, Panya, 18, attends Kenwood and is looking at Florida A&M, Stanford and the University of Illinois, among a half a dozen schools.
For Yarber, a single parent who works for the Social Security Administration, promises of financial aid have eased her concern about massive debt for college loans.
”I didn`t know how college was going to be financed,” she said. ”It`s a blessing is what it is. She has worked very hard, and I`m very pleased and proud that we have these choices.”
