Texas Christian University Holds Its First Black Student Recruitment Weekend

Black students were not admitted to Texas Christian University until the mid-1960s. Since that time, racial integration has progressed at a snail’s pace at the Fort Worth campus. Today only 5 percent of the student body is black. In the Princeton Review’s The Best 361 Colleges for 2007, TCU ranked 351st in the category of racial and economic class interaction among students.

But there are signs of progress. There are 94 black students in this year’s freshman class, an increase of 20 percent from four years ago. Recently TCU held its first overnight recruitment weekend for black high school seniors. Black students who had applied or had been accepted at TCU but had not indicated their intention to enroll were invited to Black Senior Weekend. The students were treated to dinner and a men’s basketball game. Prospective black students were paired with current African-American students who acted as hosts for the weekend.

Copyright © 2008. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.