UNM's Office of Institutional Research announced Friday it misstated the number of American Indian and Hispanic students in the 2003 freshman class.
Based on high school SAT and ACT exam data gathered during UNM's recruitment activities, the statistics were compiled by the office for a report on long-term enrollment trends.
Once UNM admits students, student information is transferred to an admissions database.
It is believed the errors occurred at some point during the data transfer, said Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Brian Foster.
He said it is unclear exactly where in the process the errors occurred, but he and others are investigating.
Foster said analysts from the office discovered the University overstated the number of American Indian students in UNM's 2003 freshman class by about 60. It understated the number of Hispanic students by 70.
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In 2003, 4,004 American Indian students were reported and made up about 12 percent of the enrollment at UNM. Hispanic enrollment was reported at 9,682, or about 30 percent of the total enrollment.
Institutional research Director Mark Chisholm was unavailable for comment.
Foster said no one intentionally changed the numbers, and UNM has "absolutely nothing" to gain from overstating or understating the statistics.
"Nobody's been advantaged or disadvantaged," he said. "We haven't got any money out of this. There's nothing like that. All we want to do is come clean and make it clear that we made a mistake on the data."
Foster said the implementation of Project LINK will help prevent these kinds of data errors.
LINK will redesign and streamline major business and records processes at UNM. The component of LINK dealing with recruitment and admissions will be activated in fall 2005, according to its Web site.
Students can declare one ethnicity on their college entrance examinations and another on their UNM admissions application, resulting in discrepancies when demographic numbers are tallied. LINK would create a single file for each student and only use ethnicity information from students' admissions application for statistics.
Foster said some students who are half-Hispanic and half-American Indian use one designation or the other depending on what result it will have on qualifying for scholarships and other programs. Doing so causes discrepancies in demographic statistics, he said.
"It's self-declaration - self-disclosure - so we don't go back and question what people tell us," he said.
