Recruiter’s relationships build a gateway to college for minority students

Tom Browne met the student three years ago at a community-run greenhouse in Milwaukee. The young man was a whiz with plants, and Browne saw his potential immediately.

But he kept his hopes in check. Then a sophomore at Milwaukee’s Riverside High School, the student didn’t have the grades to match his ambition. Many classes, including chemistry, seemed largely pointless to him.

But Browne didn’t give up.

“We talked about how there are aspects of chemistry that you need to know for some of the experiments he was doing in the greenhouse,” says Browne, who coordinates diversity initiatives for the UW–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “And the lightbulb started to go on a little bit.”

After the talk, the student’s grades improved dramatically. At Browne’s urging, he spent six weeks in a UW–Madison summer research program, and now he’s waiting to hear if he’s been accepted at UW–Madison.

“He’s interested in agronomy, and if he comes here I know he’s going to have an impact in the college, because he’s awesome,” says Browne. “I don’t care what his grades say.”

For Browne, the job of recruiting minority students to CALS and UW–Madison often comes down to these kinds of personal relationships. Just 10 percent of the college’s 2,300 undergraduate students are minorities, about the same as with UW–Madison’s overall population and on par with other Big Ten universities.

Some of the disparity reflects the demographics of the Midwest, but it also points to a hard fact for universities that want to have diverse populations of students. Students in underrepresented minority groups, including African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Cambodians, Vietnamese and Hmong, are less likely to meet the university’s admissions standards and when they are admitted are more likely to struggle on campus.

“There’s just no question that the schools that some of our students are coming from have better resources than the schools that many of our targeted minority students — or for that matter even our rural students — are coming from,” says Browne. “Many of the teachers are doing yeoman’s work, but there is still a resource gap and an information gap that in some cases we’re trying to bridge when these students get here.”

Browne’s core strategy for increasing the number of targeted minority students at CALS involves expanding the pool of admissible students. This takes him into high school classrooms, and sometimes into middle schools, where he details what students need to do to be admitted to UW–Madison. In far too many cases, he laments, students interested in science majors don’t learn until too late that it’s highly recommended they take four years of math and four years of science in high school. Many aren’t encouraged to participate in summer internships or research experiences, activities that would help increase their chances of admission.

“This achievement gap has been such a pervasive thing, and there have been a lot of theories about why it exists. But in my opinion, it just comes down to information,” says Browne. “From my experience, when students get the right information about how to succeed — and get it early enough — they do fine. They are on par with other students.”

Browne knows that lesson from experience. Growing up in Milwaukee, he had a bit of a shock when he started Marquette University High School, a private Jesuit high school, where he discovered he wasn’t as prepared as his peers, who had come from better-supported schools. “I had to play catch-up all the way through Marquette,” he recalls.

After high school, Browne came to UW–Madison, the first person in his family to go to college. In five years, he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology while playing on the Badger football team as a wide receiver. He completed a master’s in counseling psychology in 1996, also at UW–Madison, and then worked as a counselor and adviser at Edgewood High School and UW–Madison’s athletics department. He joined CALS in 2006, attracted by the opportunity to work on the college’s diversity initiatives.

“A lot of students think that the only prestigious careers out there are being a doctor, being a vet, being an engineer or a business person, which are all great things to do,” says Browne. “But I also try to expose them to other really great careers that our majors can lead to — like working in the food industry and anything related to the plant sciences, especially with the urban agriculture movement that’s going on.”

At CALS, Browne now leads several efforts to steer students down those paths. Every summer, he partners with the university’s Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence (PEOPLE), a well-established program designed to help students of color and low income students make the transition from high school to college, working with the students interested in CALS majors. During the school year, he visits urban agriculture high schools in Chicago and Minneapolis, places where students follow tracks in food science, horticulture and animal sciences. He is also establishing relationships with a number of Milwaukee institutions, including Walnut Way Conservation Corps and Growing Power, two organizations devoted to sustainable urban farming; the Urban Ecology Center, an environmental education center; and a number of public schools.

Browne says patience is a necessary ingredient of success. “Just being a recruiter and handing out brochures doesn’t work, particularly in the populations I’m working with,” he says. “For them, it’s all about relationship building. They don’t want us to come once a year, or once every few years, and hand out brochures and leave. They want an investment.”

But there are signs that diligence is paying off. “There are a number of students I’ve gotten to know really well through these activities and they are applying to the UW–Madison now,” says Browne. “If they get in, I think they’ll do really well, because they’ve been exposed to the things that we do here, they kind of know how to get around, and they’ve already built relationships with some of the faculty.”

And if they go elsewhere? In Browne’s view, that’s still a success story. “I just want them to be prepared for wherever they go — to at least get them thinking about what they are going to do with their lives and how they are going to do it,” he says.