National Hispanic magazine picks KU

The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education magazine has selected KU in its 2003 Publisher’s Picks list of colleges and universities that do a “fine job recruiting, enabling and graduating Hispanic students.”

The magazine also has named the KU School of Law to its list of the top 100 Hispanic-friendly law schools in the nation.

KU boasts eight multicultural-scholars programs on the Lawrence campus. The program, recognized as one of the nation’s most successful retention programs for students of color, began 11 years ago in the School of Business and has expanded to architecture and urban design; journalism; education; pharmacy; human development and family life; African and African-American studies; and languages and humanities. Last fall KU’s HawkLink program, designed to recruit and retain students of color, was named one of the most successful programs of its kind by one of the nation’s leading higher-education consulting firms.

This fall, for the second consecutive year, KU reported record-breaking recruitment and retention of minority students. The number of students in four minority groups—African-American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian—rose to 3,281 this fall, 316 more students than in 2002. KU’s first-time freshman class included 520 minority students, a 15.6 percent increase over 2002. Retention of first-year minority students has improved by 71.2 percent since 1998.