Recruiting for Success

Berea’s answer to diverse recruitment

Nationally, the number of students attending college after high school is in decline, according to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). As stated in the DOE’s September 2023 report, titled “Strategies for Increasing Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education,” these trends are more profound among students from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds. In 2021, 58 percent of Black and 57 percent of Hispanic/Latine high school graduates immediately enrolled in college, a 7 percent gap compared to white graduates. In addition, the report showed the gap in college enrollment between high-income and low-income high school graduates has remained persistently large. While 79 percent of high-income graduates enroll in college, only 48 percent of low-income students do.

Considering the Supreme Court’s decision to abolish consideration of race in college admissions, the need to combat these decreases and close equity gaps only grows. The DOE suggests colleges and universities implement recruitment strategies that target graduates of color from lower-income households, in keeping with research showing “that early engagement with potential applicants, such as higher education institutions building relationships with underserved students in K–12 schools, can increase the likelihood of enrollment.”

So, what would this sort of recruitment look like? Well, this is an answer Berea has had for more than 40 years. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Berea placed Carl Thomas ’78 in its southeastern territory to help talented students of color from Appalachia learn about and attend the College. In those 40 years, the Birmingham, Ala., native split time between Berea and his hometown and recruited more than 850 students from Alabama to attend Berea College. As the associate director of Admissions and the coordinator of minority services, Thomas’ recruitment work was central to the College’s Black student enrollment increasing from about 7 percent in the 1980s to its current level of 27 percent.

After Thomas’ retirement in 2018, Berea hired two more assistant directors of Admissions focused on Black and Latine recruitment—Frank Polion ’89 and Kahlil Baker ’96.

“Finding the right students takes being intentional about where we are building relationships,” Baker said about his recruitment efforts in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Building relationships allows the students Berea recruits to be seen and considered holistically, based on many facets of their background and experiences. Baker said he starts with figuring out which schools he should spend his time in and be in communication with, looking at factors like diverse population, financial standing and percentage of students graduating who go on to college.

“As our focus is on recruiting Black and Latine students that will qualify and succeed at Berea,” Baker explained, “Frank and I don’t spend as much time connecting with schools that don’t have significant numbers of students of color, serve more affluent populations or whose students typically choose options other than college.”

Once he is in the right schools, Baker focuses on building relationships not just with students, but with the influencers in their lives. “It is a lot easier for parents, teachers and counselors to push students to Berea than for me to pull them,” he said.

By building relationships with the people in students’ lives every day, Baker can best educate them about Berea, its mission and the benefits to students who apply and are admitted into the College. These individuals know students in their schools better than Baker, and they often are the first voices to introduce the idea of Berea to the best potential students.

Pathway Programs

Berea also has two pathway programs to help identify and recruit high-achieving, low-income students. The Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Dr. Samuel Hurst Scholars programs award exemplary juniors who are active in their community, school, civic and/or church organizations; demonstrate financial need; have resilience, perseverance and grit; and have a cumulative (unweighted) high school GPA of 3.4 or higher.

The Dr. Carter G. Woodson Scholars program, named after the “father of Black History” and a 1903 Berea College alumnus, is geared toward students who demonstrate outstanding character, academic achievement and leadership—as exemplified by the life of Dr. Woodson. Berea has offered Woodson Scholar awards for nearly 15 years. New in 2024, the Dr. Samuel Hurst Scholars program—named for the inventor of resistive touch-screen technology and a 1947 Berea College alumnus—was created to target first-generation students who will be the first in their family to earn a college degree.

For those students who are selected as Woodson Scholars, their admissions counselors are intentional with communication throughout the summer, and then students are invited to a Woodson Preview Day on campus in October. In addition, they receive a “celebration in a box” alerting them they have been selected. The blue ticker-tape stuffed box is filled with a glass or acrylic engraved award, a Berea College hoodie and an announcement of the award stating Berea’s No Tuition Promise Scholarship worth $190,000 over four years, which is available to all Berea students.

“I tell counselors, ‘Even if your student never looks at Berea College, if we can celebrate their accomplishments up to that point and it helps them in their confidence to believe they can go to college, we are still being true to our mission,’” Baker said. These pathway programs and awards build affinity for Berea and support the College’s First Commitment “to provide an educational opportunity for students of all races, primarily from Appalachia, who have great promise and limited economic resources.”

Berea’s history of targeted outreach and pathway programs is directly aligned with the DOE’s recommendations for higher education institutions to maintain or expand recruitment of diverse pools of capable students applying and being admitted to their institutions. For Berea, this approach is not new and has been affording the College exceptional students for decades.