Sean Murray

This fall, millions of American students returned to school with a noticeable difference in
their learning environments. For the first time, minority students make up the majority in U.S.
public schools for the first time. But at the University of Kansas, the white population still
outnumbers the combined minority groups.
While the national demographic breakdown is approaching a 50-50 split between the
white and non-white population, the KU student body is 71 percent white, according to the KU
Office of Institutional Planning and Researchs Fall 2014 enrollment statistics. Despite this, the
University is still relatively diverse, said Blane Harding, director of the Office of Multicultural
Affairs at KU.
The University has placed a greater emphasis in recent years on bringing
underrepresented students to KU. Although the average public school population on the national
level is more diverse than the student population at KU, the level of diversity at the University is
much higher than the standard in Kansas, Harding said.
In the past three years, KU has done a hell of a job recruiting minority students to this
campus, Harding said. We have had the three highest freshman minority classes in the history
of KU, and I think the last class was somewhere around 22 percent of the freshman class that
were students of color.
Even though KU has increased diversity ever year for the past three years, this is
expected to change with the incoming freshman class in 2016. Currently, most universities in
Kansas have the same admission requirements, which admit students if they score a 21 on
the ACT (980 SAT), rank in the top one-third of their high school class or have a 2.0 high
school GPA, according to the Kansas Board of Regents. Under the new standards, to be
admitted to KU automatically, new freshmen will need to meet one of two GPA/ACT

Sean Murray
thresholds after graduating from a certified high school. The first requires a minimum 3.0
high school GPA combined with a 24 on the ACT (1090 SAT), while the second requires a
minimum 3.25 high school GPA and a 21 on the ACT (980 SAT).

Of the students that we have now that are students of color at KU in 2014, a large

number of them wouldnt be eligible to apply under the standards of 2016, Harding said.
So when the standards go up, the pool of students of color to choose from goes down, so
our numbers will go down unless the University finds a different way to recruit those
students of color.

While the domestic diversity at KU may decrease as a result of the raised admission

standards, the University plans to combat this by more heavily recruiting international
students. KU recently signed a 15-year contract with international universities to recruit
more international students with the goal of doubling the number of international students
at the University, Harding said.

Admissions officials are not necessarily worried that the raised admissions

standards will affect the international students as much as they would the domestic
minority students because of the drastically different financial circumstances of these
student groups, said Amy Rossomondo, co-director of Spanish language instruction in the
department of Spanish and Portuguese at KU.

International students that have come here to study tend to be very privileged,

Rossomondo said. In order to go to college in the United States, you are coming from a
family in Latin America for example that is very well-positioned financially.

In order to accommodate for this increase in foreign students, the University will

specifically train faculty and staff to address possible culture issues. International students

Sean Murray
would have the same kinds of problems that KU students would have if they were to
student abroad in a country such as Spain, for instance, so the faculty need to be prepared
to deal with issues such as culture shock or language barriers, Rossomondo said. One way
the University plans to prepare for this is by having workshops for faculty and staff that
enable them to work with international students better and understand their needs more
clearly, Harding said.

Since the level of diversity is increasing at KU, Harding said it is important that both

minority and white students learn to handle diversity better. Students seem more open and
receptive to the idea of diversity in her experience in the last 10 years, Rossomondo said,
so University officials need to continue to support this concept that the world is becoming
more diverse.

It all comes down to cultural awareness and cultural competency, Harding said.

We need to continue promoting the ideas and the concepts of diversity and agreeing to an
understanding of what diversity really looks like at KU.