Lawsuits move slowly, but the world spins fast. Since Abigail N. Fisher sued the University of Texas at Austin, 3,000 days have elapsed, bringing many changes to college campuses. Although the age-old debate over race-conscious admissions surely will endure, the conversation about campus diversity has broadened in scope. Who gets in still matters. But who a college recruits, and who, once there, gets a chance to thrive, is just as important.
Let’s rewind. The nation met Ms. Fisher in the spring of 2008, a young white woman who had been denied admission to the Texas flagship and wanted to overturn its race-conscious policy. That was before the economy collapsed, yanking higher education into an uncertain era. State funding sagged, family incomes fell, and jobs vanished. Colleges went on recruiting students across a widening socioeconomic gap.
Get up to speed with a collection of past Chronicle coverage.
As the recession rolled on, public and private campuses alike had to confront another challenge: maintaining enrollment and revenue amid demographic shifts. Admissions offices peered into a future where high-school cohorts were becoming more diverse and less affluent. Who were tomorrow’s students? And would colleges be ready to serve them? Anxious administrators grappled with those questions.
Meanwhile, minority students far and wide raised their voices, expressing deep frustrations with their campus life. In 2013 black students at the University of California at Los Angeles made a viral video decrying the scarcity of young men there who looked like them. Nonwhite students at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and elsewhere used social media to describe their alienation and anger. Last fall black students at the University of Missouri at Columbia, responding to incidents of bigotry, led dramatic protests that set off dozens of others on campuses nationally.
Demographic change and the surge of activism have forced colleges to reckon with what comes before and after admissions. The Fisher case focused on that process, but it’s hardly all that matters. The path to a highly selective campus is much more difficult for poor students and underrepresented minorities than for white, affluent applicants. And merely accepting someone doesn’t guarantee that person a rewarding experience.
As courts weighed the particulars of UT-Austin’s admissions policy, institutions have grappled with deeper issues, such as increasing the academic preparedness of underserved students, and trying to get more of them to apply to college. Groups have pushed to reduce “undermatching,” the pattern of needy students’ attending less-selective colleges than their grades and test scores suggest they could. A slew of big-name colleges have created a new application platform meant to widen access.
“Campuses are recognizing it’s not just about how we admit students. It’s about how we get them to submit an application in the first place,” says Dana Strait, a senior consultant at the consulting firm EAB, formerly the Education Advisory Board. “How do we invest in their preparedness and familiarity with college?”
Since the Fisher case began, many colleges have reached a more nuanced understanding of campus diversity, says Arthur L. Coleman. “For too long, the question began and ended with: What are the numbers? Do we have a diverse student body?”
Those numbers, of course, are important. Yet so, too, are pedagogical and cultural questions, like whether all students are reaping the benefits of the diversity colleges strive to deliver.
Campus leaders are doing more now to fulfill their obligation to support the many kinds of students who matriculate, says Mr. Coleman, a managing partner and co-founder of the consulting firm EducationCounsel LLC. “There are real psychological and educational consequences of admitting classes with lots of differences,” he says. “That means active engagement with students.”
Failing to engage with them leads to problems. Unhappy, isolated students aren’t likely to succeed, colleges have realized. “You can’t do recruitment without retention,” says Fred A. Bonner II, a professor of educational leadership and counseling at Prairie View A&M University, in Texas. “You’ve got to put things in place not just to keep underrepresented students there, but to give them a fulfilling collegiate experience.”
Mr. Bonner, whose research focuses on black men, heard an emphatic refrain in the recent campus protests. “These students are saying to colleges, You hit your targets. So now what? You did all this to get me here, but what kind of experience are we getting on the back end?”
‘Two Different Fights’
Race and class are different threads, but they often entwine. Since Fisher arose, scholars and students alike have helped college leaders see how socioeconomic disparities, and not just race, shape students’ experiences.
When Jarius Sowells enrolled at UT-Austin, in 2009, he felt intimidated. He would walk into classrooms and see no other black faces. He often didn’t feel at home on the predominantly white campus. Yet Mr. Sowells, who grew up in a rough part of Dallas, felt disconnected for other reasons, too. He couldn’t afford to eat where many other students ate, or to live where they lived. “Austin is a very privileged area, with many students from privileged backgrounds,” he says.
Mr. Sowells failed all of his classes that first semester and left the campus. But he returned, studied hard, and joined campus groups, earning a bachelor’s degree in African and African-diaspora studies last year. He has followed the Fisher case closely. “There are these two different fights,” he says. “One’s on the legal side, and the other’s when we come back and look at the underrepresentation of black students, at students who don’t come from privileged backgrounds.”
Although more people are talking about social inequality now than they were eight years ago, colleges aren’t doing nearly enough to confront it, some observers insist. “The rising economic inequality in the society at large contributes to the increased rhetoric around socioeconomic diversity on campuses,” says Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and proponent of so-called class-based affirmative action. “But there’s a lack of actual action. Selective colleges have not kept up. There’s an enormous underrepresentation of socioeconomically diverse students.”
He understands why. Compared with overcoming a lack of racial diversity, he says, “it’s a less-visible and more-expensive problem to address.”
Still, a recognition of economic disparities has driven changes on numerous campuses. In 2008 the University of South Carolina introduced the Gamecock Guarantee, a program for low-income and first-generation students. It provides substantial aid — and a campus support network, with intensive advising. “You can woo all you want,” says Scott Verzyl, associate vice president for enrollment management there, “but it’s no good if you can’t help them pay for college and succeed.”
Colleges can’t do either for students they don’t really consider. And the standards for admission at the nation’s choosiest colleges remain a barrier for students who have had fewer opportunities — who tend to have lower standardized-test scores. “Fairness requires changing the admissions system to eliminate current biases baked into … evaluating who ‘fits,” says Nancy Leopold, executive director of CollegeTracks, a nonprofit group in Maryland that helps low-income and first-generation students get to college. “These are clubs, admission to which we use to determine our worthiness. So many of those already in the club maintain their sense of self-worth by making sure new members are ‘the best’ and preferably look like them.”
The Fisher case was about fairness, what kind of consideration different applicants deserved. Although Thursday’s ruling upheld UT-Austin’s race-conscious policy, the Supreme Court said the university was obligated “to engage in constant deliberation and continued reflection.” The majority opinion also affirmed that “diversity takes many forms.” Those words echo the continuing challenge of considering the many dimensions of a given applicant’s story, which might include parents of different races, or other subtleties not captured by superficial classifications.
For all that might have changed since Abigail N. Fisher filed her lawsuit, some things have not. Many Americans remain fixated on who gets acceptances — and why — from a handful of the nation’s most-ballyhooed colleges. By and large, those campuses have a fixed numbers of slots, which means plenty of promising applicants get turned down, which means plenty of promising applicants have reason to think the game’s unfair. And by most any measure, it is.
Has the Fisher era brought us any closer to an agreement about what’s just in admissions, what’s good for colleges, what’s right for society?
Mr. Coleman, a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, has thought about such questions for many years. And he wishes he could offer a different answer: “I’m not convinced that we’re closer yet.”
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
