In 1961, the University’s African-American population consisted of two people – Hamilton E. Holmes and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, marking the desegregation of the University.

It’s been 48 years since then and though the University has increased its number of African-American students, there are still just a few who are enrolled.

“We’re still working to be more diverse,” said Nancy McDuff, assistant vice president of admissions. “Seven to eight percent of the class is African-American. We would certainly like to have more.”

The freshman class size is usually 4,000 to 5,000 students, she said. This year more than 4,700 freshmen are enrolled at the University – 362 of which are self-identified as African-American, just 7.6 percent of the freshman class.

“It’s been pretty constant for several years,” McDuff said. “Sometimes this has to do with how big the whole class is, and when the freshman class is larger you have more people that identify differently.”

McDuff said during the recruitment process, admissions tries to recruit from lower feeder programs – schools that don’t usually have a high applicant rate to the University.

“We recruit really hard by getting to students early in the decision-making process and encouraging them to come to campus,” she said.

Still, with between 1,000 and 1,800 African-American applicants in the past 10 years, the number enrolled – although increasing – is small.

The highest number of African-American applicants to the University was in 1995, with 1,571 applicants. Of those, 903 were accepted and 440 enrolled.

Although the number of African-American students enrolled following acceptance is between 40 and 60 percent in the past 10 years, retention rates at the University for African-Americans are higher than that of the overall University population, McDuff said.

“We’ve had pretty good success with getting more students enrolled that are African-American, with a pretty good retention rate,” she said.

The last few years, the retention rate has been about 93 percent – which is high for a public university, McDuff said.

Cheryl Dozier, associate provost for the Office of Institutional Diversity, works with the office of admissions to increase diversity.

“There has been a significant increase in the number of African-American students that apply, and those accepted to the University to the percentage that comes,” Dozier said.

“We still would like to see the numbers increase of historically underrepresented students.”

McDuff said one factor contributing to the small increase of African-American applicants is the competitiveness with other universities and the cost of out-of-state tuition.

“Out-of-state tuition is $24,000 to $25,000 more than in-state,” she said. “It’s pretty hard for us to attract students out-of-state, particularly African-American.”

But in some cases, it takes a while to change perspectives, McDuff said.

The racial stigma some may associate with the University might deter a few students from attending, but Dozier said that doesn’t stop her from trying to change students’ minds.

“I present the numbers,” she said. “The University is the flagship school and because we have our criteria, which probably has the highest rigor, it is one of the more challenging schools to get into.”

But Dozier said regardless of race, if students meet the criteria, they are accepted.

“There is a past – we don’t want to negate the past – but we will celebrate 49 years this year and 50 years in 2010 of desegregation of the University – and that wasn’t a long time ago,” she said.

Dozier said the University tries to recognize that its focus has changed to be a more diverse campus.

“On the whole, I am not going to say there aren’t issues of biasness,” Dozier said.

“But what I say to students when they ask me ‘Am I going to be discriminated against?’ or ‘Is there going to be biases towards me?’ There is going to be bias wherever you are, but how you address them is what matters.”

McDuff said the University offers about 15 targeted programs for minority students.

Vanessa Smith, director of programs and outreach, said outreach has played a pivotal role in increasing enrollment among African-Americans.

“The students that apply and get accepted is a pretty good number every year,” she said. “But it is actually the number of students that come and enroll at the University is where we have to do our work.”

Smith works with the program “Georgia DAZE” to help enroll admitted students into the University. This year, between 85 and 87 percent of students who participated in the program last spring chose to attend the University.

Patrick Winter, senior director for admissions, said the yield – the percent of students enrolled out of those accepted – for African-Americans was also higher than that of the overall University.

“The yield for African-Americans was 57 percent last year and for all students it was about 50 percent,” he said. “African-Americans choose Georgia at a higher rate than students overall.”

Alfred Richardson, a senior from Johns Creek and president of the Black Affairs Council, said the organization started working with admissions last year to do “Call Outs,” a program allowing admitted students to talk one on one with a “real student” about questions they may have concerning the University.

“We are working more with admissions to get [African-American] students into the University,” he said.

“We definitely want to work by getting students involved in student organizations.”

He said he is happy to see an increase in African Americans here. “With numbers and percentages it varies, but you have to go by percentages even though numbers may be soft, it could be a bigger percentage of [a particular] class,” he said.

Richardson said he came to the University after receiving a Charter Scholarship in high school.

“Where I am from, when you say you’re going to UGA, it’s a big deal,” he said. “A lot of my friends went because of the institution itself.”

Though Richardson doesn’t fall into the category of students who associate the University with stigmas, he said he knows people who did, but fell in love with the University after their first year.

“Once they got here they found their niche and wanted to stay,” Richardson said. “I guess you can say they found their family at UGA.”