Brown University, the nation’s oldest public liberal arts college, has admitted nearly 1,500 African-American applicants to its newest class of 20,000 students.
The university says it’s making an effort to hire a higher percentage of African-Americans than at any time in recent history.
And it’s not only admitting more applicants, but offering more resources to support them, like tuition discounts, job placement, and other services.
The admissions office at Brown University says it expects to admit an additional 1,400 students this year, or about 1 percent of the incoming freshman class.
The Brown admissions office also says the new class will be the largest in the school’s history.
The school’s admissions office says it has the highest student-to-faculty ratio of any college in the country.
The ratio of incoming students to the incoming faculty is 1:1.
At Brown, about 6,500 people work in the admissions office.
Brown said the school is making an unprecedented effort to recruit more black applicants to fill the new enrollment, and the new admission will be especially important for African-America students who have been denied admission at other schools because of their race.
The college, which is located in the suburbs of Chicago, said in a statement Monday that the admissions announcement will not impact its plans to increase diversity in its enrollment, faculty, and staff.
But the announcement will likely bring scrutiny of Brown’s admissions practices, including the university’s decision to enroll fewer black students in its new class of new freshmen.
The statement said Brown has historically been one of the most selective universities in the nation.
But Brown has struggled to fill positions at its flagship campus in Providence, Rhode Island, and its other campuses.
Brown has about 7,000 undergraduates.
The announcement comes just days after Brown, which has been the subject of criticism from civil rights groups and others for its history of race discrimination, announced plans to enroll more minority students.
But critics say the college should have been more transparent about its admissions policies, including its admissions of more students of color.
The latest announcement comes as the college is grappling with a shortage of white and Asian-American students and has faced a growing national outcry over a series of high-profile cases of race-based harassment and assault against minority students at the university.