From The New York Times —
Sometimes white people can seem really ignorant, says Alistaire MacRae, a 17-year-old Navajo high school student, noting the time he and his family vacationed at Yellowstone National Park and were soon surrounded by tourists snapping pictures of them, as though they were a herd of elk.
Still, Mr. MacRae wants a college education and knows that some good universities are predominantly white, far from his homelands in the Arizona desert, and hard to get into. So his parents paid $50 for Alistaire to join 50 other American Indian students this summer, meeting with representatives of Harvard, Stanford and 19 other schools for a crash course on how to apply to elite colleges.
“This has really opened up my mind,” said Kyle Hegdal, an Eskimo who is a high school senior from Fairbanks, Alaska, midway through the course on the Carleton College campus here. Mr. Hegdal said he had not previously contemplated applying to any Ivy League school. “But now I’m thinking East Coast, maybe M.I.T. or Cornell,” he said.
American Indians and Alaska Natives, who make up about 1 percent of the nation’s population, are underrepresented at many highly selective colleges, contributing well below 1 percent of undergraduates.
Even those who enroll often drop out. On average, fewer than one in five Indians who enroll in college earn a bachelor’s degree, said Norbert Hill, executive director of the American Indian Graduate Center of Albuquerque.
The article continues.