Race-conscious admissions policies are here to stay. Race-conscious admissions policies are in peril. The justices in Washington have affirmed the status quo. The justices in Washington have undermined it. Campus officials can rest easy. Campus officials should keep chewing their fingernails.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ambiguous ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin has inspired contradictory interpretations. Since the long-awaited decision, in June, college presidents, general counsels, and enrollment chiefs have combed the majority opinion, searching for a glimpse of the future. What will tomorrow’s college admissions look like?
Much like today’s, with affirmative action alive and well at most selective colleges, many admissions deans hope. Still, more and more of them are planning for a day when they must don blindfolds—and admit a class without considering race or ethnicity.
That means thinking harder about race-neutral ways to achieve campus diversity, like taking sophisticated measures of applicants’ socioeconomic status. Admissions deans are asking more questions of colleagues who manage race-blind programs, which they describe as a mixed bag of opportunities and challenges.
In the evolving story of race in admissions, Fisher has delivered both reassurance and doubt. Although the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as one of several factors, it said a lower court had failed to apply strict scrutiny to Austin’s race-conscious admissions policy, giving the university too much deference to determine if it was necessary.
Colleges, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, bear “the ultimate burden of demonstrating, before turning to racial classifications, that available, workable, race-neutral alternatives do not suffice.” Those words have sparked confusion about whether colleges must first try out a race-neutral program—or merely document why they opted against such a strategy. While some public-interest lawyers are predicting more litigation against colleges, the Fisher case is back before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is scheduled to take it up next month.
“We’re hearing a lot of concern,” says Bradley J. Quin, executive director of higher education advocacy and special initiatives at the College Board. “Colleges are very desirous of diversity on their campuses, but they’re very worried about staying on the right side of the law.”
Mr. Quin, a former admissions director, is among those who see cracks in the pillars supporting the use of race in admissions. Now, colleges with race-conscious programs must prepare for more-intense questioning from courts. Officials ought to re-examine every strategy from recruitment to retention, he says, to determine that considering race is the only way to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.
“Institutions will no longer have the latitude they were permitted in the past,” says Mr. Quin, “to say race-neutral programs wouldn’t work.”
He and other proponents of race-conscious programs worry that colleges will underreact to the Fisher decision and its potential implications. Some fear that the Obama administration’s recent advice to colleges could lead to complacency.
The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice released policy guidance last month for colleges that consider applicants’ race. Fisher, federal officials wrote in a letter to college presidents, had “preserved” the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which upheld the use of race as one of several factors in admissions. Accompanying the letter was a list of questions and answers maintaining that the Fisher decision had not changed what colleges must do to narrowly tailor their admissions programs to meet diversity goals—a reading some legal scholars dispute.
The missive from Washington had a soothing tone. And as much as supporters of affirmative action may want to believe it, some enrollment leaders think the government’s guidance is too optimistic. Colleges, they suggest, should proceed accordingly. Imagining an alternate route to diversity is easy enough to put off—until a court, or voters, decides the blindfold must go on.
So far, institutions in a handful of states have stopped considering race in admissions. Those policies have originated in courts, state legislatures, and ballot boxes. Years later, some admissions leaders are still wrestling with the outcomes.
Among them is John Barnhill, assistant vice president for enrollment management at Florida State University. Like many of his counterparts, Mr. Barnhill entered the profession at the height of the affirmative-action era, which molded his understanding of how admissions should work. Starting at a small college in Georgia in 1976, he wanted to help more minority students reach higher education. “They faced a lot of roadblocks and hurdles,” he says, “and I believed it was my job to remove those for them.”
Two decades after Mr. Barnhill had moved to Florida State, the diversity equation changed. It was 1999, and the governor, Jeb Bush, issued the One Florida Initiative, an executive order that effectively ended the use of race and ethnicity at the state’s public colleges.
Florida State resolved to enroll diverse students in other ways. In the admissions cycles that followed, Mr. Barnhill’s staff focused on two questions that they hadn’t previously. What was an applicant’s socioeconomic status? And had his or her parents attended college?
In many ways that information has benefited the university. “It widened the net,” says Mr. Barnhill. “It captured more than just minority students. It captured students who certainly deserved our attention.”
After the ban, Florida State’s Center for Academic Retention & Enhancement broadened its reach to support the university’s low-income and first-generation students, regardless of race, with services like academic advising and success coaching. The center runs the Summer Bridge Program, an orientation that previously served only black students. Now the program is open to disadvantaged applicants of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Those eligible for Pell Grants, the federal government’s main support for needy students, and who meet specific academic criteria complete a supplemental admissions application. If admitted, the students must attend the bridge program, and they continue to receive academic support throughout each year.
Diversity Without Racial Preferences
In states where public colleges can no longer consider race in admissions, some selective institutions have stepped up efforts to expand the pool of prospective students from underrepresented minority groups. Here are some examples.
Part of the National College Advising Corps, this program trains recent graduates of the University of California at Berkeley as college counselors and places them in low-performing schools.
The University of California at Berkeley offers intensive transfer advising to first-generation and low-income students at about 30 community colleges in the state. During the summer, some students also take classes or participate in research at Berkeley to further prepare for transfer.
The University of California at San Diego started this middle and high school to create a pipeline of low-income students whose parents did not graduate from four-year colleges. Preuss requires a longer school day and year and parental involvement, and focuses on college preparation.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor runs a weeklong science- and culture-focused camp for middle-school students from American Indian tribes in the state. Faculty and staff members from the university’s Native American Studies Program teach the Ojibwe language.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor breaks into teams a diverse group of faculty, staff, and students and sends them into high schools in underprivileged communities across the state. In those visits, the Wolverines talk about their experiences on campus and more broadly about academic success and college aspirations.
—Beckie Supiano
The evolution of this alternative admissions program has helped Florida State increase its socioeconomic diversity, one good outcome Mr. Barnhill sees from the move to race-blind admissions. “I’ve made peace with it,” he says.
The policy change, he explains, has prompted officials to devise more-robust recruitment strategies, enhance campus resources for underrepresented students, and more carefully consider how policies like meal-plan requirements might affect lower-income students.
Still, Mr. Barnhill often thinks about the inability to consider a student’s race, and how it complicates the work of evaluating applicants and shaping a class. In a nation he considers far from race-blind, he wishes he could still hand-pick that one black applicant from the pool, the one with so-so SAT scores and lots of potential. A student’s socioeconomic status might be a proxy for race, he says, but it’s no substitute. “You’re telling me to have a diverse campus,” he says, “but you’re tying one hand behind my back.”
Many colleges have struggled to maintain the enrollment of underrepresented minority students after bans on raced-based admissions programs. In some cases, it has taken years to bring those percentages back up; in others, the numbers still lag.
At Florida State, the proportion of nonwhite students has grown from about 20 percent before the ban to almost 30 percent today, Mr. Barnhill says. During that time, the share of Hispanic students has increased to 14.8 percent, from 7.4 percent—a jump Mr. Barnhill attributes largely to the growth of the Hispanic population in Florida. Yet the enrollment of black students has fallen to 9.3 percent, from 12.8 percent.
“For us, the hardest thing about race-blind isn’t achieving diversity,” Mr. Barnhill says. “It’s maintaining diversity among all different groups. It’s hard to get just that one African-American student when casting this wider net.”
The reasons for a college to consider race-neutral programs surely go beyond preventing a lawsuit. Proponents of class-based admissions policies argue that colleges have a moral obligation to bring in more low-income students, especially as those from middle- and upper-income families still claim most of the seats at the most-selective colleges. Race-conscious programs allow colleges to “take the easy way out” by enrolling wealthy students of color, Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, wrote in The Chronicle in September.
Among admissions officers, however, objections to dropping race abound. Some are philosophical: As long as race matters in society, it should have meaning in admissions. Others are practical: Forgoing any consideration of race will add time and costs to the recruitment and selection processes, as officials will have to work even harder to enroll diverse students.
But Kevin MacLennan, director of admission at the University of Colorado at Boulder, thinks his staff has found an efficient way to gauge students’ socioeconomic background, and how it puts their academic credentials in context.
Back in 2008, when Colorado voters were poised to vote on a ballot initiative to bar the use of race in admissions, Mr. MacLennan sought a race-blind way to preserve the diversity of incoming classes. Although the initiative did not pass, the university changed its admissions process to give greater consideration to disadvantaged students of all racial and ethnic groups.
To its traditional evaluations, Colorado has added two sophisticated statistical measures. The “disadvantage index” helps admissions officers understand how an applicant’s socioeconomic background has influenced his or her chances to enroll in college, and the “overachievement index” compares an applicant’s academic achievement to that of students with similar backgrounds.
The two measures provide a detailed picture of applicants’ backgrounds: their family income, the number of dependents in their home, whether English was their first language, and the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches at their high school, among other variables. Students at a “moderate” or “severe” disadvantage who demonstrate “high” or “extraordinary” overachievement get a boost in the evaluation process. The tools have helped the university enroll more low-income students, as well as more minority students, says Mr. MacLennan.
“It’s enriched and widened our view of diversity,” he says. “It’s an objective, quantifiable measure of socioeconomic disadvantage that allows us to look much deeper into the makeup of the freshman class.”
But even as Colorado is doing more to assess applicants’ social class, it is still using race. “Having both of them,” Mr. MacLennan says, “can help us make more-informed admissions decisions.”
In other words, a college may see race-neutral strategies as complements to—and not replacements for—race-conscious ones. “Wouldn’t it be better,” asks Mr. Quin, of the College Board, “to have a belt-and-suspenders approach?”
Achieving campus diversity has come to be seen as an either/or proposition. That’s wrong, says Arthur L. Coleman, a managing partner at the consulting firm EducationCounsel and a former deputy assistant secretary in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Among colleges that use race in admissions, he doesn’t know of one, he says, “that isn’t robustly pursuing race-neutral strategies as well.” Might courts soon doom race-conscious ones? “I don’t buy that,” he says.
As predictions about future rulings fly, it’s easy to get lost in the judicial handicapping. But the debate over how best to achieve diversity involves much more than the law. It’s about how colleges and states set their priorities. To what extent will they help widen the pool of qualified, underprivileged applicants? How much will they finance college access?
“Most of us do take this very seriously, but it’s a very resource-intensive endeavor,” Jonathan R. Alger, president of James Madison University, says of enrolling low-income students and helping them succeed. “When you have fewer financial-aid resources, it’s a significant challenge.”
Mr. Alger, a former assistant general counsel at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, coordinated the institution’s legal efforts in its two landmark affirmative-action cases a decade ago. Colleges, he thinks, will have to be more flexible in designing—and redesigning—their admission policies.
“We can’t afford to wait years and years,” he says. “You don’t leave generations of students shut out while trying to find the perfect solution.”
