By Sherie Black and Pat Centner
(AgapePress) – America's elite colleges are actively recruiting homosexuals. The Boston Globe reports that in the cutthroat world of college admissions recruitment, homosexual students are emerging as an appealing new niche.
“What is the climate at Harvard for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students?” This question was added last year to Harvard's sixty “frequently asked questions” that are answered in the school's student viewbook. The Globe says this same question is being raised increasingly at elite colleges like Harvard, Tufts and Bates, and their desire is to answer it in as glowing terms as possible.
School admissions officers claim that the “coming out” experience by homosexuals in high school breeds self-confidence, leadership qualities and cultural awareness — all qualities that colleges want in their students. They make this assertion, however, even though they lack statistics to undergird their premise that homosexual students outperform their peers.
But colleges are being thwarted in their homosexual recruiting efforts by one simple question: How do you appeal to a population of people that cannot identify themselves by simply checking off a box on their college applications?
As a possible answer to that dilemma, Brown, Harvard, Yale, and about forty other New England colleges recently sent representatives to Boston for the nation's first college fair for homosexual high school students. Mark Taggart, chief organizer of the event, said that several admissions officials had been asking homosexual organizations in the area how to go about recruiting homosexuals.
“I've heard from several colleges that this is a population they want to reach out to, but that this is the only student population that lacked a good venue to directly market to them,” said Taggart, who is with the Massachusetts Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.
To attract homosexuals, some schools are including nondiscrimination policies in their admissions viewbooks as a signal of acceptance. The University of New Hampshire (UNH) admissions office has even begun reaching out to a high school in Dallas whose mission is educating homosexual students.
“It's foolish to act like different sexual orientations are a taboo — they're a reality,” said Jibril Salaam, UNH's associate director of admissions for inclusion and diversity
(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)