Minority Report

While psychology graduate student Matt Trujillo was deciding whether or not to come to Princeton, he received a call from a member of the Latino Graduate Student Association (LGSA) who offered to answer any questions Trujillo might have had from the perspective of a current Latino student. A year later, Trujillo is the LGSA’s vice president and actively involved in the University’s efforts to bring more underrepresented-minority graduate students to campus.

“Is Princeton as diverse as I would hope it is? No,” Trujillo said. “But the fact that Princeton realizes that in itself and is making efforts to change that is definitely giving me a positive view towards the University.”

The Graduate School’s recent efforts to expand the enrollment of underrepresented-minority students are commendable, but that it may be several years before these initiatives produce significant results, several graduate students said.

“I think the effects won’t be seen for a number of years because the school isn’t traditionally seen as a place where [underrepresented-minority communities] prosper and are vibrant, which they are and continue to be,” said Benny Padilla, a second-year graduate student in the Wilson School.

The Graduate School’s yield for African-American, Latino, Hispanic and American Indian students was 63 percent for the 2008-09 academic year, up from 59 percent the year before and 57 percent in the 2006-07 academic year, according the Graduate School’s admission website. This year, 48 members, or roughly 8 percent, of the 608-person incoming graduate-student class belong to underrepresented-minority groups, up from 7 percent the year before.

“Princeton has a reputation that precedes it that may not appeal to people from other parts of the country,” LGSA treasurer Alejandro Rivas GS said. “Princeton kind of has a disadvantage when it comes to minority students,” he added, citing the school’s location and reputation as elitist as reasons why some graduate students of color are reluctant to attend.

The Graduate School is working hard to change that perception through the Office of Academic Affairs and Diversity in the Graduate School. The office offers a special hosting weekend in the spring for admitted students of color, David Redman, an associate dean of academic affairs in the Graduate School, said in an e-mail. At these events, Redman said, “We emphasize Princeton’s intimacy and superb scholarly and financial resources.”

In the 2007-08 academic year, the diversity office launched two new programs specifically targeted at recruiting prospective minority students: a preview day in the fall and an open house in the spring. “Our goal is to give these prospective graduate students firsthand experience of Princeton,” Redman said.

Several minority graduate students said they appreciated the University’s recruitment efforts when they were deciding whether to attend Princeton.

Rivas said that Princeton was the only school he visited that offered recruiting events specifically targeted at minority students. For “all the other programs that I was considering, most of my interface was with the actual department and discipline,” he added. “Here at Princeton, my experience was twofold — by [the] sociology [department] and just the general Graduate School.”

When Rivas was accepted to the Graduate School, the other students he met during hosting weekend “went out of [their] way to show that the graduate experience at Princeton was nothing like the undergraduate experience at Princeton.”

Those other students stressed that “whatever ideas we had about the undergraduate community had no bearing on the life of a graduate student,” Rivas said, adding that he thinks stereotypes about undergraduates dissuade some people from applying to the Graduate School.

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Taniecea Arceneaux, a graduate student in applied and computational mathematics and the secretary of the Black Graduate Caucus (BGC), said that before she even applied to the Graduate School, she received e-mails from the Office of Academic Affairs and Diversity outlining the academic programs and offering to provide resources for the application process.

“It was very enticing,” Arceneaux said.

Despite these efforts, the Graduate School still faces significant obstacles in its quest to raise the enrollment of minority students.

The suburban location may be off-putting for some prospective applicants, Rivas said, adding that Princeton’s lack of a law school, medical school and business school also deters students of color. Minority students tend to “apply more to the professional schools than to the academic disciplines,” Rivas explained.

Graduate School Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Karen Jackson-Weaver ’94 expressed a similar sentiment in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian in April 2008. The diversity office must “help students understand that a Ph.D. can translate into something that will make a positive impact on the community, in the state and perhaps even the world,” she said, noting that more than 50 percent of African-American graduate students attend either business school or a master’s program in education, neither of which is offered at Princeton. Jackson-Weaver did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Most Latino graduate students on campus are in the Wilson School, “not even in the academic field,” Rivas said.

Padilla said he thinks the Wilson School may be more successful than other departments are in recruiting underrepresented-minority students because “they kind of have their own image apart from the Princeton University community.”

Organizations like the LGSA and the BGC have allowed minority students to form close-knit communities on campus in spite of the low enrollment numbers, students said.

BGC treasurer Ann Futrell GS, a second-year MPA candidate in the Wilson School, said that the small minority population “hasn’t been a problem” for her “just because there is a strong committed community to strengthen minority connections on campus.”

Though Arceneaux said the low minority enrollment might deter students from applying, she explained that “the actual community is very tight knit and very supportive, and that is what drew me here. It’s kind of the environment within the community that ... draws students in.”

“I have a community here,” Rivas said. “And I have a community of people who aren’t of my same ethnicity.” Rivas added that one of the LGSA’s primary goals is to encourage prospective students to attend Princeton and to dispel the stereotypes of wealth and elitism that surround the University. “You’re here for academic reasons, and you shouldn’t have to worry about not fitting in,” he said.

Trujillo said that the LGSA has been working to emphasize the minority presence in University academics, noting that the organization hosted a Latino research symposium this year for the first time “as a way to help illuminate … that there are Latino researchers here.”

Many administrators and students said that though they thought the diversity of the Graduate School could still be improved, the efforts made thus far have helped combat what Jackson-Weaver referred to last spring as the “strong perception that Princeton is the kind of selective institution that does not have communities of color.”

Trujillo said he thought the new recruiting tactics would gradually attract more minority students to Princeton. “It will likely take time,” he said.

Dean of the Graduate School William Russel said in an e-mail that he is aware of the work that needs to be done and also said improvements have been made.

“We certainly need to do better with respect to underrepresented groups and are making some progress,” he said.

Futrell said she was “impressed” by the University’s minority recruitment efforts, adding that she is “look[ing] forward to seeing how [they] will progress in the future.”

Rivas said that one of the LGSA’s primary goals is to convey to prospective graduate students that today’s Princeton is no longer characterized by the same stereotypes that surrounded it when it didn’t admit women or minorities.

“Undergraduates aren’t leading this kind of elitist life that popular opinion has put out there,” he noted, adding that Princeton is “unique, but it’s not hostile.”