Federal guidance is coming soon. Until then, don’t let third parties dictate your admissions policies.
That’s essentially what Catherine E. Lhamon told college officials on Wednesday at a national summit of higher-education leaders hosted by the U.S. Department of Education.
In her remarks, Lhamon, assistant secretary for the department’s Office for Civil Rights, described the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision that significantly limited the consideration of race in admissions. “The court’s decision, as we know, sharply limited a tool that colleges and universities with selective admissions practices have used to create diverse campus communities,” she said. “The court did not question the educational value of diverse student bodies.” Lhamon continued: “Lawful avenues remain open for colleges and universities to pursue diverse classes.”
The court’s relatively narrow decision left colleges with many unanswered questions — some big-picture, some fine-grain and practical. One: Did the ruling require colleges to stop making “check box” data about applicants’ race available to admissions officers?
Yes, the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said in a recent letter to 150 public and private colleges. The letter, signed by Edward Blum, founder of Students for Fair Admissions, cited several passages from the court’s majority opinion, including its emphasis that the law requires “color-blind” admissions practices: “It is therefore incumbent upon your institutions to ensure compliance with this decision.” The letter also instructed colleges “to prohibit your admissions office from preparing or reviewing any aggregated data (i.e., data involving two or more applicants) regarding race or ethnicity,” among other suggested changes.
On Wednesday, Lhamon responded to recent interpretations of the court’s ruling. “I have heard about groups who are not the Department of Education or the Department of Justice sending schools notifications about what they say the law is and what they want you to do,” she said. “I offer you this: You will know, when you hear from us.” The comment drew loud applause.
“To be clear,” Lhamon said, “Congress assigned the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice the responsibility to enforce Title VI in schools. We will. And we do.”
Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, referred to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in her remarks, pointing out that the country has never been colorblind. “Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America,” Clarke said, “to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether the legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented intergenerational transmission of inequality that still plagues our citizenry.”
Colleges, she said, “should continue to ensure that their doors are open to students of color. Admissions offices should continue to accept applicants who possess the characteristics and attributes necessary to succeed and contribute on college campuses and the world. Values like grit and perseverance, curiosity, and academic and personal excellence.”
Students of color do not have to ignore their lived experiences, and neither do colleges and universities when considering their applications.
Clarke referred to a key passage that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., wrote in the majority opinion: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
Though Justice Roberts cautioned that the above wasn’t a loophole for getting around the court’s decision, the so-called carve-out allows colleges to consider what a student might write in an application essay about, say, overcoming racial discrimination. But a benefit given to such an applicant, Justice Roberts wrote, “must be tied to that student’s courage and determination.”
“The Supreme Court,” Clarke said on Wednesday, “recognized what we know to be true: that race can be relevant to a person’s life or lived experience, and may be relevant to one’s motivations or one’s academic interests, or one’s goals,” she said. “For instance, maybe that would be a university considering an essay from a Black student who discussed her interest in becoming a civil-rights attorney after going on a field trip to a courthouse to hear arguments in a landmark school-desegregation case. Or maybe it would be crediting an applicant explaining that their interest in history stems from learning how to cook … traditional Jamaican dishes from their mother, and how that experience encouraged that applicant to learn more about their family history and Jamaica’s influence on global culture.”
Those examples, Clarke said, were drawn from her own life. “Students of color do not have to ignore their lived experiences, and neither do colleges and universities when considering their applications,” she said. Colleges “remain free to consider any characteristic of a student that bears on the institution’s admissions decision, such as courage or determination, even if the student’s application tied that characteristic to his or her lived experience with race.”
Lhamon and Clarke said their departments would release guidance on complying with the court’s decision in August.
