It is sad that Diversity at such a fine university should be so "arrested". You are right...the admissions office needs to get more pro-active on this. They need to seriously consider working through various bridge organizations, there in Wisconsin, that can help them identify academically gifted individual starting, say.... in grade school. This can be done based on National Achievement test scoring and having the info as to which students are coming from which schools. If they can identify some urban predominently African-American or other minority middle and high schools, they can get the test scores of individuals at these schools and start some type of mentoring/nuturing program.
John Hopkins University has a program called "Center for Talented Youth" (CTY). ALthough this is a academic merit program rather than a race based program, it does show that Universities do have access to national databases on student scores. This particular program tracks students who score in the 97 percentile or higher. These same students are then invited to take the SAT (while in the 7th grade)....and depending on how they score (they must score higher than 80% of nationally graduating seniors), they can participate in a variety of summer academic programs on various College Campus in the United States throughout their some middle school and 3 of their high school years. I know about this one, only because my daughter participated in it for 4 summers...starting in the 8th grade.
There are other universities doing specific work with minority students with high school students.
Here's a useful Google search query result link.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=University+minority+recruitment+programsYou should check it out, and locate some programs that would be comparable to what your school could do....and then give the info to the admissions office. You can later on follow up, and ask them what have they done with the information.
Like you, I agree that the universities have to do their part....and they do have a large part to play...if they are game.
Good luck!
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