As expected, the Supreme Court has drastically limited the use of race in college admissions. Now presidents and admissions officers are considering ways to adjust their admissions processes. But if educating a talented and diverse student body is the goal, reforming admissions should not be their central focus.
The nation’s colleges with the highest average SAT scores — the most-selective four-year institutions — have pursued racial diversity through admissions for decades, and here are the results: Compared to the other nearly 2,000 U.S. colleges, the 129 most-selective ones enroll substantially fewer lower-income (25 percent versus 36 percent) and Black (9 percent versus 13 percent) students. While Hispanic student enrollment at these institutions is closer to the national average among colleges (12 percent versus 13 percent), it falls far short of the percentage of Hispanic people in the United States (19 percent and growing).
That record demonstrates that — at a time of steady demographic change — our nation’s top colleges must do more to deliver the diverse graduates needed to drive economic growth and innovation in medicine, technology, climate science, politics, and other fields. Society needs college leaders to think and act more boldly.
As colleges adjust to the new legal reality, leaders should prioritize two big things. First, increase need-based financial aid so that more racially diverse students are admitted and can afford to enroll. Second, recruit and admit more highly qualified students transferring from community colleges.
Invest in more need-based financial aid. About 25 percent of financial aid provided by colleges goes to students from the wealthiest families, most of whom, according to federal financial-aid methodology, can afford the full cost of college. Meanwhile, there is good evidence that many highly qualified students are not admitted to top colleges because their family cannot afford tuition and other college costs. Their slots are given to wealthier students who may be less qualified but whose families can afford to pay.
Because race and ethnicity are highly correlated with wealth, these practices disproportionately exclude Black and Hispanic students. We know that more money can be dedicated to need-based aid. Some highly selective colleges — Amherst College, Pomona College, and the University of Central Florida, for example — have figured out how to enroll more low-income students and achieve higher levels of racial diversity than their peers. More top colleges need to do the same.
Recruit and admit more community-college transfers. Every year, an estimated 15,000 first-year, low-income community-college students earn at least a 3.7 grade-point average, yet they have not transferred to any four-year college. How is this possible? These students have proven their merit: Research shows that community-college students who transfer to selective colleges do just as well as students who start at such colleges as freshmen, including at highly selective colleges. Yet, community-college students are overlooked by most selective colleges, which on average enroll far fewer community-college transfers than other four-year institutions.
Selective colleges can achieve greater diversity by reserving more slots for community-college transfers, actively recruiting those students, and ensuring that those students receive the same need-based financial aid as students who arrive as freshmen. Transfer students are a great source of diversity for two reasons. First, they have excelled in actual college courses, which is just as (or even more) predictive of later success in college than high-school admissions processes that rely on SATs, grades, and the like. Second, community-college students are far more likely to be low-income, Black, or Hispanic than those who start at four-year colleges. An added bonus: Community-college students who have earned an associate degree are already halfway to a bachelor’s, so they require much less financial aid to graduate.
Top colleges have relied on traditional admissions processes to increase diversity for too long. Now that the Supreme Court has made that more difficult, courageous action and new approaches are needed.
The talent is out there, far more than is reflected in the student bodies at top colleges. It’s time for leaders at selective colleges to look where the most-promising students have already proven their merit, and to commit to financially supporting them. That’s a strategy that can deliver diversity and stand up to judicial scrutiny.
