Black students who show a penchant for Black activism in inquiry emails to historically and predominately White colleges have a greater chance of being ignored by college admissions counselors at those universities, according to research findings published in an academic article this month.
The article “We Want Black Students, Just Not You: How White Admissions Counselors Screen Black Prospective Students,” asserts that predominantly White schools want Black students, but that desire is based on the racial “palatability” of the student.
White admissions counselors responded to the emails from Black students who presented as “deracialized and apolitical,” 65 percent of the time, but responded to emails with antiracial narratives 55 percent of the time, according to the study.
The author of the study, Dr. Ted Thornhill, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida Gulf Coast University, said he and his staff arrived at their conclusions after sending emails from fictitious students to 517 admissions counselors at as many colleges and studying the number of responds they received.
They used first names they surmised a White admissions counselor may think belonged to a Black student and paired those names with the most common surnames for Black people as reported by the U.S. Census, which tracks the most common names by race, Thornhill said.
Admissions counselors were determined to be White after researchers studied their pictures online.
There’s no way to determine that 100 percent of the 517 counselors contacted were, in fact, White, he said.
