The recruitment policies for Marquette's precollege programs are not likely to change despite the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's decision to change its precollege scholarship requirement from race to economic status.

The Department of Justice's Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Public Instruction signed an agreement last month under which the department's Minority Precollege Scholarship Program would change its requirements from minority to economic status.

"They asked us to change the requirements because it was race exclusively," said Kevin Ingram, director of the Wisconsin Educational Opportunity Program, which administers the scholarships.

The scholarships will now use the National School Lunch Program guidelines for free and reduced lunch requirements to award the scholarships, according to Joe Donovan, communications director for DPI.

"We don't expect the makeup of the program to change significantly," Donovan said.

The Minority Precollege Scholarship Program will be renamed the DPI Precollege Scholarship Program. The changes go into effect July 1.

Ingram said the changes will apply to the next group of applicants. The program reimburses the students after they attend programs designed to give them a taste of college life, he said.

"This has been an ongoing issue for some time," Donovan said.

A complaint was first lodged with the organization in 2001, Ingram said. The scholarship program was created in 1982, according to Ingram.

"The goal was to try to create a pipeline for minority students to try and go on to college," he said.

The data is going to be evaluated in four years to see what kind of an impact the change has on the makeup of the program, Ingram said. He said the program will hopefully still be composed of mostly minority students.

Marquette's Educational Opportunity Program is federally funded and is not associated with DPI scholarships, according to an employee at the Upward Bound office. Upward Bound is a precollege program designed to introduce low-income and first-generation students to college. However, the school does offer precollege programs where students can apply for DPI scholarships.

Rose Richard, assistant dean and director of precollege programs for the College of Communication, said the DPI change will not have much of an impact on their programs "because we've always been multicultural," Richard said.

Richard said there has always been at least one Caucasian student in the programs and minorities were targeted to improve the diversity of Marquette's student body.

Students apply for the programs by submitting an application. If they are admitted into the programs, they can then apply for the DPI scholarships.

"I think it might affect our program somewhat because some of our students are not below the poverty line," Richard said.

Manuel Santiago, associate director of the Health Careers Opportunity Programs, said the change is not going to affect his program. The current requirements are for disadvantaged students, who are juniors in high school or younger, he said, and they target people interested in a career opportunity program in sports medicine.

The sessions run twice a year. Santiago said six students finished the last session. Of the six students, there were three blacks, one Asian, one Hispanic and one Caucasian. He said the number of different races represented fluctuates.

"We're going to recruit students as we always have," Richard said. "The students want this experience. They want to know something outside of their own ethnicity."

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Dec. 9 2004.