Going for the gays: campuses give it the old college try, to show they are gay-friendly - Update

University Business, July-August, 2002 by Nicole Rivard

Colleges are still in the "101" stage when it comes to recruiting gay students, but some say they want to get better at it, as they strive to build a more diverse student population. The biggest obstacle: identifying that target audience.

"Campuses do a better job of informing students about their environments than they do actually identifying and recruiting students," says Dea Nelson, publications coordinator/ Enrollment Services at San Jose State University.

But that may no longer hold true. Recently, several admissions officers in Massachusetts took it upon themselves to query regional gay organizations about ways to recruit gay students. As a result, about 40 New England colleges were invited to the annual Youth Pride celebration for gay teenagers, which took place in Boston in May.

Just by their attendance at the event, schools such as Harvard University were seizing an opportunity to neutralize and eliminate any negative stereotypes gay students may hold about them. This kind of tactic makes more sense to administrators than creating outreach programs, since gay students aren't as easily identifiable as other minority groups. What's more, the administrators are hoping the students will see how gay-friendly the schools are, and approach on their own.

Says Marlyn McGrath Lewis, Harvard's Admissions director, "We always try to dispel stereotypes that people may hold about Harvard, and we have been aware that gay students seem increasingly concerned and unable to figure out whether the cultures of colleges are more--or less--welcoming and tolerant. Harvard is an exceptionally tolerant place and we have taken some pains to make that clear--and not just to gay students." Although the university does not have a special outreach program for gay students, Lewis says the school wile continue to take advantage of opportunities like the event in Boston.

As for Nelson at San Jose, she does not yet know of any admissions officers actively recruiting at such events in her area. On her own campus, the approach has been to show through San Jose's recruitment materials that the school is welcoming and tolerant.

"I keep working on this issue in our campus viewbook (our primary recruitment piece), and I keep making it less and less subtle," she says. "This year, we ran a `portrait' of a gay student, and also highlighted his Gay/Lesbian Bisexual Transgender community group. In the photovisual, the rainbow flag is prominent. I decided we needed a strong visual that a GLBT prospective student couldn't miss--even if he were just flipping through the pages."

Viewbooks and other collateral materials that reach out to students are the best tools to recruit gay students, maintains Derrick Koh, a student at SJSU. "The wrong way would be to single-out `out' students. That would be really bad. The student will approach you if he or she is comfortable enough."

Koh and other students are trying to establish a GLBT center at SJSU which would provide counseling, reading materials, and a place where people can talk--overall, a safe spot for GLBT students. Ultimately, information about the center would be included in recruitment materials.

In the meantime, SJSU's regional admissions association, the Western Association for College Admission Counseling, has begun collecting data for GLBT students, which it posts on its Web site, www.wacac.org.