Balance (1965 - 1990)
1970's
In 1970, debates about college admission reached a high pitch. Many elite universities and colleges had just pledged themselves - under pressure from student activists and civil rights organizations - to expand significantly enrollments of minorities students.
Julie A. Reuben
"Merit, Mission, and Minority Students: The History of Debates over Special Admission Programs"
In the 1970s, after a decade of legal and social policies that extended equal educational opportunities, the College Board and other educators recognized that the national commitment to equal educational opportunities for blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans was eroding. To re-focus attention on issues of minority access to equal education, the College Board sponsored in 1977 a series of six seminars and published the papers of these seminars in Beyond Desegregation: Urgent Issues in the Education of Minorities.
The seminars examined five themes: defining the problem of the education of minorities, government policies, legal approaches, specific aspects of the problems affecting minorities, and the special counseling needs of minority students. Participants argued that institutions could do more to aid minorities succeed in higher education if more minority faculty were hired and if institutions were more sensitive to language issues, including the special needs of bilingual-bicultural students.
Other participants to the seminar noted that government policies at the state level were moving away from desegregation and support for equal educational opportunities. Federal government policies, one participant argued, should do more to assist the higher and professional education of blacks.
The seminars also examined the Brown decision and efforts at desegregation, the Adams case about dismantling the dual systems of higher education, and the Bakke decision that put into question special admissions programs.
In relation to counseling minority students, participants argued that counselors needed to understand the socioeconomic and cultural background of minority students and that they needed to be prepared to act as advocates for black and Hispanic youth. Conveying personal belief in minority students, the participants suggested, would do much to assist minorities in learning to control their lives and succeed.
The College Board's regional offices also sponsored a number of programs and projects. Regional office programs included those aimed at increasing minority participation in the Advanced Placement Program, and those that exchanged information or organized conferences about minority access to higher education. Regional offices also offered training sessions for Upward Bound and Educational Opportunity Center programs, and sessions on the use of data on minorities in higher education.
